Winter of 1956

Recently I’ve been reflecting on some random moments from my past. They aren’t especially monumental moments, but they have consistently come to mind over the years…maybe they have more importance then I think.  

There was the time a few of my friends and I ran around the football field behind our house …. 15 times. I’m serious…it was 15 times. Admittedly it was a slow jog, but we did it. I told my older brothers and they thought I was delusional. Yet the proof was in the pudding, as the next day I could hardly move; I was so stiff, I could barely walk.

I sometimes recall the day we moved from our home in Southeast Missouri back to St. Louis. It was a freezing rain type of day, somewhat common in St. Louis in the winter. As we waited for the moving van to arrive, my mother and I spent the night at my Aunt Genevieve’s apartment on Delmar Blvd. The one thing I remember is that the bathroom was very hot…. but it felt so good because the apartment was chilly and outside it was a wintry mess.

The next day I remember moving into our new home, a 3^rd floor apartment.  I had a huge steam radiator in my room that was either ON (100 degrees) or OFF (-20 degrees). I remember opening the windows and sticking my head out in order to cool off…. waving my hands to try and get the cool air into my room. I tried to just tweak the handle a millimeter turn so I would get just a bit of heat….no deal,  either OFF or ON……. no IN-BETWEEN.

The next day we went to visit St. Luke’s where I was going to school for 5^th grade. Taught by the sisters of St. Joseph, I thought I had landed on Mars. All these nuns in full black habits…woe, no “funny business”. Our playground was a concrete parking lot with a couple of baskets and no nets. It was hard to blend in with my thick Southern accent and inability to diagram a sentence. They thought I was from Mars.  If I could have run away, I would have …. but I didn’t know where I was or where I could go. I think I tried to convince my mother that I should skip grade school and go immediately to high school or college or get a job or retire….but she didn’t buy it.  I was miserable, but I was trapped and had to just keep moving. (I’ll save the Annie Oakley Lunch Box story for another time…it’s still pretty painful)

Well, I somehow was able to make some friends and day by day life got a little bit easier. St. Luke’s had a  baseball team and I had a pretty good arm so I became the pitcher on the team. My accent started to modify a bit so that wasn’t so bad. I got used to the nuns and the priests who would visit our school and bonk a few unruly boys on the head. I tried to keep a low profile. I became an altar server but usually was assigned to the low profile masses where the grade B servers went…like the 7:00am daily mass during Christmas vacation. Riding my bike for over a mile in the St. Louis winter up a big hill was not my idea of Christmas vacation. But then again the sacristy was so toasty warm when I arrived at 6:59am. 

That was the winter of 1956, almost 70 years ago….. yet the memories remain pretty vivid. God was watching over me during those difficult days and he kept me safe. Life went on and many beautiful memories awaited me. And that is very good news.