MEMORIES OF MOM #5

(From my brother, Steve, about his deceased wife, Regina, to his children)

I will go into a little bit of what I can remember about Reggie telling me about her life when she was a kid.

 

Mom was always the kid who was an Ann Landers for the neighborhood. She was the one the kids came to with their problems; she listened and gave her opinion. She grew up with her Grandma and Grandpa in the house and she played one against the other. If her mom and dad did not give her the what she wanted, she went to her grandma and got it.

She was also a spoiled girl with her Aunt Nettie. Her Aunt was older than her Dad and it looked like they would never have any kids. Reggie was like their child and spent a lot of time at their house and got her way with them. I guess that is why Reggie got her way a lot in life because I tried to spoil her too.

 

I will just tell one story about your mom that I have heard many times. Rick, her brother, overheard your mom talking about something with her friend Loretta. I know it had been serious enough that she did not want her mom and dad to know about it. Rick was going to tell and he ran for his life and Reggie chased him with a large frying pan. He went up the stairs and hid in the locked bathroom for a good hour. Reggie stood right outside the door and did not make any noise.

 

After an about an hour, Rick looked outside the door. He slowly poked his head out of the doorway. WHAM BANG WARM BANG! Your mom hit him in the head with a large, heavy, black frying pan and he was knocked out. I think Loretta and Reggie felt she might have even killed him. Now Rick had two things he could tell his mom and dad. Reggie said she became Rick’s slave for a long time after that. Any time he needed a ride to the pet store for his snakes or mice, she would have to take him. I do not know how long this went on but he got her back for that event and got her good.

 

We lived right across from Our Lady Of Sorrows Parish Church. We lived right on Gravois Street in a four family flat. We were the only people living there with kids and the landlord was not too sure if the other families would like us being there. The other residents were all older and not used to the noise.

 

We would have stayed longer but there were two things that happened that made moving a must. The first was a back up in the sewer and it flooded the basement. Reggie said that it could not have been our fault because we used regular dippers and not the new disposable ones. Well, she did have some but we had a diaper service and we used the disposable ones only when we went out and about. Well, when the sewer backed up the 2nd time and water was everywhere in the basement, the landlord got real mad. He really saw fire when the guy who worked on the sewer found a regular diaper in the sewer trap. We had to pay for the plummer and then promised to move.

 

We found a place just a block away on Holly Hills street. In fact, it was a great place and had a lot of room. The house was right next door to where your Uncle Tom now lives on Holly Hills Street. The two family flat had a sun porch, 3 bedrooms, a large kitchen, dinning room and a nice size living room. We planned to stay here a long time because it was close for us to see Reggie’s mom and dad and my mom was not that far away as well. I did not have but 2 miles to go to work at Colonial Bread Company and we lived near all our friends.  

 

We used to get our food at a store called Clancy’s. This family had a store on Holly Hills and MacCausland and was a friend of the family. They had a store just a long block away. Reggie used to do the grocery shopping on the phone. She would call up and order the food after looking at the sales flyer in the Neighborhood News Paper. The store would take the order, box it up and take it to the door. One of Tom Clancy’s kids would put the box of groceries on the kitchen table and even put the cold stuff in the icebox. (I know I still use this name for a refrigerator but not as much as I used to back then.)

 

We used to shop on Wednesdays because that was double stamp day. We saved stamps a lot. We did not have to pay the store until Friday, payday. Yes, back then small stores like Clancy’s, which was an A&P store; it had a store charge for its regular customers. The stamps they used, I think, were gold stamps, not eagle stamps. (You used Famous Barr to get eagle stamps and they gave you double on certain days.)

 

Mom liked staying home and she could walk to her mom and dad’s house during the day and take Angie along in a stroller. Life was really good living here at this place. However, not for too long! We rented the place from a woman named Mrs. Theodore; she lived just down stairs. She was a widow and was a real nut case. She would come and look around our house when we were not home. The sun porch had these wide and deep awnings, above the windows. You could leave the window open just a bit during the hot days because the sun porch would really get hot. Well, you could leave them open; however, even though the rain would not come into the window, Mrs. Theodore wanted them closed. We would leave them open just a crack and we would find them closed when we came back home. She would sneak up and close the windows.

 

She did not tell us she was doing it until one day, it just slipped out. Well, one day I left and she thought your mom and Angie went with me. Mom was on the throne and had the door open to hear if Angie was OK. Mom heard a noise and she saw the landlord opening up the back door to the apartment. She started to walk in and look around. Mom got up and walked up to her and pushed her down the steps. The landlord fell back and went down the steps and mom yelled “And stay out you bitch”.  Well, the landlord thought she was going to kick us out of the apartment in just three weeks. She tried to but it never happened. Oh, we started looking but we knew she could not put us in the street just like that because we had 30 days from the day of the last rent paid. We had just paid the rent a few days before the incident so we had almost 60 days to find another place to live.

 

 

The next two months were hell for the gal downstairs. We walked like we were in a Nazi marching unit day and night. I got up at 5 in the morning to go to work and darn, if I just could not walk softly in the morning. And the doors just seem to only close when you slammed them real hard. The real big pain in her ass that we planned got her really steamed up. My brother Mark was going to go on a weekend trip; Reggie and I took Mark and some of his friends to their weekend fishing trip. When we left we put baby power on the steps of the front hallway.  We knew she was coming into the front door when we were gone. The day we got home, we opened the front door and we closed it right away.  We rang her bell and ask her to call the police and told her somebody broke into the house.

 

The police arrived a few moments later and we talked to the officer about a possible brake in. We told him we set a trap and we did not know if someone was still in the house. We then opened the door and we told the cop that we suspected somebody was coming into our apartment when we would be gone. We showed the officer the footprints in the hallway and the how the powder tracked the person who broke in. Well, he went with me and we looked over the place and asked me to report anything missing. I waited until I got back on the porch and your mom and the asshole landlord was present. I then said “Reggie, I am missing a watch and the stack of silver dollars”. I looked right at the landlord and she knew I was lying but she could not say anything. I loved it and she did not come up and look around until the day we left.

 

We really loved the place that we were renting and because of this fact, we did a lot of nice things to the apartment. We put in a shag rug; it was in style then, in the bathroom. We put fake bricks up in the kitchen and painted the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom too. We even put a new floor in the kitchen. I paid for all the new things in the house because we planned on staying there for a long time. We even put new plumbing in the basement so we could put our washer and dryer there. We had grandpa do a lot of the work with the plumbing and also on the new floor in the kitchen.  We installed 220 electric so we could put in an air-conditioner.  We did this in just a matter of a few months. It was very heart breaking for us to move with all that we did to improve that place which we did not even own. The landlord really did us in.

 

Well, we looked and looked and we moved to Pacific, Missouri. That was one of the worst things I ever did but we needed to move fast and we wanted to own because of what happened. We moved that far away because we got the house with not a lot of money down. It was a new house but the construction and the distance was just not good.

The prior landlord and your mom and me did not talk - we just passed notes. The day we moved, your mom took pride in doing a few things that I will not forget. Shag carpeting in the bathroom looked great when we moved. You could look at the rug and it looked good, until you had to rake it up. With shag carpeting you had to use a rake, really, you had to rake it up so it would not look matted down. Your mom used a razor knife and cut it all up and then put some white glue in its place so just walking on it would not kick it all up. The first time somebody use a rake on the rug, it would come up like raking leaves. Mom just got a great kick out of that.

 

In the kitchen, we put plastic bricks behind the stove. Yes, that was in too - back then. The plastic bricks came in sheets and they looked real good. However, mom got out the razor blade knife again and put a slit in almost all the bricks. Well, we figured because the stuff was new, it would look good for a while but after a while, when the heat for the oven would heat up the area behind and around the stove, the bricks would start to show up the slits in the bricks. We tested it by taking an extra sheet and subjecting it to a lot of heat, it would work but not for a while after we were long gone. I know we did some other things but I cannot remember them anymore. However your mom even did some things that would not come to light for a few more months. Man she got the gal back.

 

We were moved in a good 2 or more months and one day, I had my boss at Colonial Bread call me to his office. He said he had some person on the phone that needed to talk to me about some harassment. It was Mrs. Theodore and she told me to stop the phone calls and stop sending over pizzas, cabs, diaper service, salesmen etc. She said that she was just going out of her mind and may sue us, if it all continues. I got mad as hell and told her that as much as she deserved all the problems that she was having how dare she blame it on my wife. My wife would not call long distance to make so much trouble for her. I went on to say that my wife had better things to do than mess with her.

 

That call was made on a Saturday, I remember because on Saturday, Reggie almost always came with me to the city. She would spend the day with her parents and when I got off, we would have dinner together and do things in the city.  Mom and dad would baby sit or your great grandma would baby sit on Saturday. I came to their house and was so mad at Mrs. Theodore that I could not see straight. I sat down to eat with the family and told the whole family what the B------ said about my sweet little wife. How dare her say these things about Reggie.

 

Your mom just started laughing out loud and she could not stop. She got up from the table and walked outside and was holding her stomach. She was actually crying and with laughter. It seems like I only knew about a small amount of the problems that your mom caused. She made calls and calls every day. She had friends call up and try and rent the place when it went back up for rent. Mrs. Theodore was a very prejudiced person and she did not like Blacks, Orientals, hicks or foreigners, in general. Now, here is where your mom really got the gal and, man, I did not know she had it in her. Your mom called up the local branch of the NAACP in St. Louis. There was a real push going on in South Saint Louis to integrate the south part of the city. People were asking to let the organization to know when apartments and homes were for sale to whites and not to blacks. Well, when the NAACP called Mrs. Theodore and let her know that the in regard to the place for rent, they wanted to know if she would rent to any black people. Mrs. Theodore told them she took the apartment off the marked because she was going to have her daughter use it. They, in turn, told her that they would be checking-in to see if she tried to rent to anyone and to see if it was really off the market. Mom grew up in this neighborhood and she had friends who kept an eye on Mrs. Theodore.

 

We lived in Pacific for a few years and it was a part of our life that really sucked in some ways. Then in other ways, it was good for us as a couple. Renee and Steve were born in this town and we had a great place for the kids to play. The neighborhood was full of kids and families that could not afford much. We went to Saint Bridget’s in Pacific and made friends at the church but not many. The whole town considered the subdivision as the new people in town. We were looked down on in many ways in this town. I guess it was because there were 3 plats to this new subdivision and we lived in the 2nd plat. The last plat was almost all government housing.  

 

I still remember that feeling of having people not taking pride in the homes that they lived in. Many of these people could live in these homes cheaper then they could live in an apartment and because the government was helping them pay for the cost of living there. You had people who cared living next to people who parked their cars on the lawns etc. We lived next to a guy who drove a semi and parked his rig on the street in front of his house. It made it impossible to park on the other side of the street from his rig and to help that out he parked on part of his grass. Oh, that was sweet.

 

This guy also had problems growing a hedge between our properties. He wanted to plant a hedge that farmers use to put between their fields that offer shelter to rabbits and small game. Now, that is good but it is also full of thorns and it looks like hell. Well, for some reason the damm stuff would not grow. I think it was the vegetation killer I put on it all the time.

 

Mom was elected to be on the subdivision trustees. We were at war with the company that built the subdivision. The place was supposed to have a great park behind our house. The place was supposed to have walkways, swings, ponds, light and benches. It was a place that a family could have a picnic at and really enjoy the area. We even paid an extra amount of money to have our lot on the fringe of the park. We were always going to the main office to see when they would start the construction of the park. Mom was very active in the neighborhood to make the builders respond.

 

The people in the neighborhood went to city hall but we did not seem to get anywhere with the city. The Mayor was the owner of a concrete plant in Eureka; he did everything he could do to stop us from addressing our problems. He would just tell us to hire a lawyer and it was not part of the city’s problems. You see the city really considered the whole subdivision as government housing and they wanted nothing to do with any of us.

 

The neighborhood starting having meetings in our basement and we started putting down the things that we all knew to be wrong with the place. Hell, there was one guy who had his house built in the wrong spot on his lot. His back yard was so small his rear steps ran into the neighbors yard. The contractor had diverted a creek and did not do it right. We had people who were loosing their back yard to the creek in a very fast pace. No work was done on the park and the subdivision was almost done. If you went into the office you could see the work that was planned for the beautiful park. We were a group of people that the city did not like and we were getting the big screw. (You know, I did not really fully understand why I have such a passion to help the Neighborhood here, where I live now, until I put my feelings about this time in my life.)

 

We had a meeting in our basement and made flyers and posters. We asked for help and asked for people to see what was going on with our plight. We had another meeting in our basement and had several members of the city council over to talk to them. The place was packed and of course we did not invite the Mayor. (BIG MISTAKE). Channel 5 in St. Louis interviewed me about an up and coming protest we planned on doing on the next Sunday. The TV crews came out and we made a lot of waves and a lot of problems for the builder. 

 

We felt that now we would get some attention soon. Your mom was on the news and she talked to the reporters while she walked the line and she looked so good. However, before the week was over the ten people who walked the protest line got served! We were served with a Ten Thousand Dollar lawsuit a piece! The lawsuit was for one hundred thousand dollars. Your mom and me were also charged with holding a meeting in our home that was in violation of some laws that pertained to a unauthorized city meeting that somehow violated some laws because the council men acted on behalf of the city and did so without the presence of all the council members.

 

I was all crap but hell, we did not know it, and we were really scared and felt we would get the shaft. One guy who did not want his wife to be a part of the protest was sued because they thought it was he and it was me that was on the line. Well, to make a long story short, one of the guys who were being sued had a friend who was a lawyer and he took the case for nothing. We went to court and all the charges were dropped and we felt such a relief.  

 

Well, that builder did not have any money in escrow to finish up the park. Hell, he never even started and he left it just full of weeds. The place started to get worse and I started a campaign to clean up the neighborhood. I worked with the boy scouts, the local churches and the residents to clean up their property. The homes had carports and most of the carports were full of junk. The night before the clean up people put their junk at the foot of their driveways. Boy Scouts help the older people get their junk to the street. The next day the city brought 2 trash trucks and a large flat bed truck and a dump truck to pick up trash. The city would pick up the trash not only in our subdivision but they started a campaign to clean up the whole town. I think they still do it one time a year now, or they used to do it one time a year, for each section of the city.

 

The only problem we had is that the people who needed to get rid of crap just went out in the cover of the night and picked up more crap and put it on their property.  It was a problem that would never go away. I know it takes pride to keep your home in good order but laws that make people keep their trash out of site is a necessity.

 

Mom went to work for the police department in town and we made some good friends in Pacific. We also were so far away from everybody that we grew up with and I worked so many hours, it was hard on mom to be a housewife. She did not like to be stuck out in Pacific. Next time, I will cover things like the Police Department and how they were a joke. How the guy who ran for the police chief who only had the qualifications of being a dogcatcher. How life for us went for you kids and how we did the first years of our marriage.

Do you guys remember the times we spent at 6 Flags when they first opened, the pool in the back yard, the walks we had in the hills of a lot of parks. We used to go to Wildwoods Reservation a lot and look at the wolves there and walk in the hills. I use to carry Renee on my back; Steve was small so he was on a carrier on mom’s back and Angela she walked until she got tired and then I picked her up too. Hell, I am going into too much already.  

 

I hope to put together a CD of the many slides we have of you kids when you were small. I hope it will bring back the memories we had doing things together. Hell, we really had a lot of great times. This was good for me too, to go over the past. I had a great time with you kids when you were small and I never did and never will grow up!