Things I Learned in St. Louis

Over the weekend I spent a few days in St. Louis, visiting my mom, and partying with my sisters and my nieces and nephews. The occasion for the get-together was the graduation one of my nephews from college, one of my nieces from college, and my youngest nephew from high school. I’ll post a few pictures later.

As I nearly always do I learned a few things in chatting with my mom. The first was something I don’t think I’d ever heard before: my dad had been a team mascot for the old St. Louis Browns. Back in the old days professional baseball teams had mascots but they weren’t the professional mascots they have today. Each year a kid would be the official team mascot for a season. He’d be dressed up in a small version of the team’s uniform and would attend all the home games.

My guess is that my great-grandfather, a character of some prominence and influence in the St. Louis of the time, had set that up.

The time frame would have been something between 1922 and 1925 or so. I’ll bet there are some official pictures or, possibly, newspaper photos of my dad in his Browns outfit (we do have at least one picture which I’ll try to get a copy of posted but I’ll bet there are more).

The second thing was an anecdote from early in my parents’ marriage. The first place they lived in after they were married was a house belonging to my dad’s Uncle Tony down on the Meramec River. Vacation houses on the Meramec in those days, more than 60 years ago, had no climate control of any kind—no air conditioning, of course, but no heating or even insulation, either.

Now, my parents were married in August and returned from their honeymoon (another great story for another time) in September, just as the weather was starting to turn cooler. My dad and his pal Jack Fischer worked on the more permanent house that my mom and dad would move into and in which I spent my early childhood years but, while they were working on the house, my mom and dad lived in Uncle Tony’s house on the river which, as you might guess, was starting to become uncomfortably chilled with only a stove to provide a little heat.

In houses on the river in those days large screened porches were commonplace, a good place to sleep in the cooler evenings, seeking a little relief in the sweltering pre-air conditioning St. Louis summers. And the walls of the screened porches were often lined with window seats, wide benches built in to the walls which could be used for seating to catch a little breeze and could be opened for storage.

One day as my mom and dad were rummaging around, looking, no doubt, for a blanket they opened a window seat to find it filled with guns. The guns were of all sorts from .32’s and .38’s to Old West shootin’ irons, Civil War era revolvers, and even old blunderbussss. Uncle Tony had been St. Louis’s sheriff for a while and this apparently was what became of the firearms confiscated by the sheriff’s office when it was under his direction.

Stories about Uncle Tony could easily fill a book, a book best written by Damon Runyon.