Life in a big city when times were very bad.

This was my and my brothers experience back then. During WWII when for a brief time(maybe 4 of 5 months) my mother came back to the country from St. Louis and took me and my brother back to St. Louis with her. The depression was ending and times were tough everywhere. On the farm though we knew nothing of this.

She had earlier abandoned us at her brothers farm and hauled away for St. Louis, leaving two young tearful children in the dust. But years later she thought that the war was ending soon and came to get us for she felt surely that the father would want to know where his two sons were.

We lived down around Chouteau and 12th street or close to it in a very bad area at the time. All around were buildings that had been demolished and it looked like a wasteland. Huge stretches of fallen bricks,trashed blocks of lots and empty spaces full of junk and places it was not wise to go to.

As she returned to her bars and other men we had to learn to steal from the corner grocery store to eat or else stand by someones back screen door until they took pity and gave us something. She never cooked. We had to survive on our own.

My brother was sitting on the curb on Chouteau with a friend when a car careened nearby,,hooking the clothing of his friend and dragging him down the street. He was then dead. My brother watched it all.

Later my brother had fallen out of a two story window and landed on concrete. As he was later dying of cancer back around 2001 he informed me that our mother had pushed him out that window as he sat on the window ledge. She also pushed him into a hot heating stove.

This life was such that later on I realized I was then going into the first stages of insanity and mental disease. We had to go outside as our bed was being used as a love nest by her and her drunken boy friend/s.

This woman had serious problems. Many women did and acted the same way during that long war. Men likewise.

We never went to the school. We just hid and ran and stole and begged. Once I took a bite out of one slice of white bread and then said I didn't want it. She slapped me to the ground for that.

So I hid her paycheck in the icebox. She went ballistic.

Only a Jewish woman who lived alone with her daughter(our age)would sometimes invite us to her apt and let us eat with them. I never forgot that woman's kindness. To this day I revere Jewish people for that kind act of mercy.

My brother took the worst of that life with him forever and never married or was able to deal with many situations the rest of his life. For 25 years he disappeared off the face of the earth until I finally ran him down,,then he died of cancer soon after. He had become a millionaire but died penniless. He wrote most of the bios code for the Sun Microsystem Workstations when they were in startup.

My father finally came home from the war. We were already back in the country and living more decently by that time. He then abandoned us once more and had divorced my mother. We preferred to live with our kinfolks on the farms and hated the ugly dirty city after that. It was a ugly time. It was very hard on children who had to endure the city life. I remember the cops would beat you for almost nothing.

So due to the war and hard times I never hardly knew my parents until I was 12 years old. I was happy on the farm even though we had to do lots of chores.

I will never ever live in a city. I have for very short periods of time when I was working but always lived on a farm or in the suburbs. The suburbs as little as possible.

When I recall the vast destroyed ugly landscape of that city back then I thought later how much like the ghettos it must have been like for me and my little brother.

Cities for the poor are trashheaps. IMO. And my experiences.

As things cycle down in the near future I don't see how it could be any different than it was back then for me in that terrible place and during hard times. Those are scars I carry of it. I will not ever return to such a possibility. It is not IMO a good place to raise children. Children are the only thing ultimately that will save this civilization. They need to breath clean air and live well.

One last note. I observed many other children that we mixed with and associated with. Their lots were about the same as ours. We would have eventually become thieves and gangsters or hoods. South St. Louis was later full of them.

Airdale