“John Frederick’s Daughters”: Pearl, Amanda, Della

This week, I’ve asked an old friend to contribute the first guest blog post to The Wellston Loop. Nan Sweet has taught English – poetry, Romanticism, and women’s writing – at U.M.-St. Louis since 1981. She publishes widely on the newly recovered woman Romantic poet Felicia Hemans. Her poetry chapbooks, Mix of Securities and Rotogravure, embrace public scenes in an urban landscape and the intimacies of life managed on a literary budget. Her children work to make the city a better place, at Black Bear Bakery and Citygarden. Her (sequential) life partners have done so too, through philanthropy and public education. I was pleased to know and work with Nan when I was a graduate student in U.M.-St. Louis’s Department of English, and I’m very pleased to reconnect with her over our shared love of Wellston. You can reach her at sweet@umsl.edu.

Linda Tate’s Wellston project has drawn me since her first web version – which thankfully is being recreated here, with a book to follow. Her absorbing memoir of the hidden mid-South, Power in the Blood, is a forecast of what this new book may be like.

Linda has invited me to post my own work on Wellston – the trio of poems “John Frederick’s Daughters.” Some readers may want to go directly to those (below) and return to the following musings afterwards.

Wellston has always been a place that straddles time and its human jurisdictions. In this way, it is like Linda’s “land between the rivers” in Power in the Blood that crossed the Kentucky-Tennessee state line and gave uncertain refuge to the region’s hybrid peoples (darker “old people” intermarried with newcomer whites). Wellston has been home to waves of ethnic and native-born groups “covenanted” out of more fashionable city neighborhoods. As a district it straddles St. Louis City and County: Wellston’s troubled future as a community may have been collateral damage of the infamous City/County division of 1876.

Whenever I perform my trio of Wellston poems, “John Frederick’s Daughters,” I identify its “streetcar loop” as the Wellston Loop. Otherwise, listeners think only of Delmar’s University City Loop, which has captured the term for its own. But the Wellston Loop on Easton Avenue, now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, was a much bigger shopping district. Its large buildings are still in evidence, including one that was a J.C. Penney’s. My poem puts the “streetcar loop” in the County, but Linda’s web links show the station straddling the City Limits. Most of Wellston’s major stores were in St. Louis City. Along with streetcar lines like the Hodiamont and Easton Avenue, Jewish entrepreneurs made this commerce possible.

The County side of Wellston achieved hard-won incorporation in the twentieth century and has for me the slightly lawless flavor of all North County’s balkanized fiefdoms. It may have been the first of these. Wellston drew my free-thinking great-grandfather John Frederick Meyer to recreate the German idyll of his youth on Audrey Avenue, complete with vineyard and pet livestock – a calf. His sharp-tongued daughter Amanda lived there too and eventually her hapless husband Emil; and for a time his daughter Della; while Pearl lived two blocks away.

Wellston would have seemed a place of retreat for the Meyers when they first arrived about 1900, and it became even more so. Ahead of them lay the First World War, with its training camp down St. Charles Rock Road on the site of the present Memorial Gardens. During the war, “Grandpa Meyer” was stoned in southern Illinois while delivering copies of the German-language Westliche Post. He was purchasing agent for this paper, once headed by Carl Schurz, the German-American Senator whose words about democracy are inscribed on the former Kiel Opera House in downtown St. Louis. Joseph Pulitzer began his newspaper career on the Westliche Post.

The Meyers trended political. Amanda (“Mandy”) was a leading figure in the local Rebekah lodge. She forged a crony relationship with Wellston’s long-time Democratic mayor Leo Hayes in the 1950s, canvassing for him and receiving favors. If Hayes made “sweetheart deals” with industry, as I suggest in the poem, perhaps those were no worse than today’s TIFs for Walmart.

John Frederick Meyer died in 1929. His funeral at Oddfellows Hall across from the Loop was followed by burial in Bethany Cemetery across from Normandy High School. Amanda and Della are in Bethany too. Pearl was the eldest and sweetest of the poem’s three sisters: she and her dear Johnny lived at  6407 Wellsmar (all in the poem!) and are buried in Zion Cemetery on St. Charles Rock Road at Pennsylvania. 

My grandmother Della’s whirlwind dancing career and circus marriage (all in the poem!) tossed her from the streets of downtown St. Louis to a wealthy home in Cincinnati and back to her father’s small home with privy on Audrey – her three children in tow. Della’s bright, thoughtful ways gained her work in a children’s store on Easton – enough to keep her family ahead of the rent collector in flat after flat of the old West End along Page Avenue.

Her daughter Louise, my mother, married a small-town boy who gained success as a civil engineer. They settled in Webster Groves. From time to time we visited “Mandy and Pearlie” in Wellston, first on the streetcar, later by car. Or I shopped with my grandmother on Easton Avenue in stores owned by Jewish proprietors whom she knew – but did not always trust. “Mandy” would phone us from her Evergreen exchange, never saying hello but plunging unceremoniously into her business. Every year when Derby time came, she gave Della access to her bookie and the bets were on.

Mandy and Pearlie assumed the role of “poor relations,” receiving my father’s unpretentious kindnesses on our trips to collect them for holidays. The resulting scenes at holiday dinners ensured that we would not forget these tenuous homesteaders in Wellston, whose houses perished with them.

Teaching at U.M.-St. Louis, where I met Linda Tate in the early 1980s, led me to a commute I still favor: from the City Limits at Hi Pointe north through Wellston (sometimes by bus in early days). When I circle the streets, I find the lot at 6327 Audrey occupied by a “Habitat for Humanity.” Occasionally I stop to use the mailbox on King and Keinlen, or to buy BBQ just west along King. I visit Bethany Cemetery, over the line from Wellston in Pagedale; there is a plot there for me. I believe the neighborhood is still solidly Democratic.

These poems are posted thanks to Rebecca Ellis, publisher of the chapbook where they appear, Rotogravure from Cherry Pie Press. Rotogravure features other North City/County scenes as well; copies are available at Left Bank Euclid, Dunaway’s, and the UMSL Bookstore.

JOHN FREDERICK’S DAUGHTERS
Nanora Sweet

Pearl

John Frederick’s eldest girl, so small
and always lame, you married Mickey first,
the Irishman who boxed for cash, then beat
you up at home. Your father had the vows
annulled and brought you home to tend his grapes.

With ads and sales and crafty deals, he kept
Carl Schurz’s German paper in the black,
a petit-bourgeois factor in a world
where Hegel and freethinking had their day.
But World War One would put an end to that.

Along came Johnny Glas, the carpenter.
He built a shotgun house for you, his bride.
His plans were true enough; but ages past
that other German war, his floors had warped,
and pinups lined his musty back-room walls. 

We kids came giggling home from visits there,
the wurst and sauerkraut you served for lunch
still heavy on our stomachs, topped by chunks
of chocolate from the crock still labeled KRAUT
(but, oh, the ants I saw there once).
                                                               Your crock
is gone, your house bulldozed, its small proceeds
spent long ago to keep the family drunk
afloat. And yet your house still furnishes
my life and greets me in the chairs and couch
of my ex-spouse; and Johnny’s tools still hang,
a stepson’s gallant try at home decor. 

And in my basement hides an entire house
that Johnny built, a shotgun made to scale
for dolls. The steps are split. The walls spring out,
the windows lose their cellulose. The paint,
undaunted, keeps its lead-based reds and greens.
(And oh, the sauerkraut that I keep now,
for me, all briny in a tub designed
for frozen yogurt.) Pearl, this all seems right.

Della

The last child of John Frederick and his wife,
you were my parents’ only parent and
you lived with us when prices got beyond
a pension dating from the Cuban war.

At sixty-five you tapped a buck ‘n’ wing
in granny shoes and pranced a cakewalk in
a pantomime of skirts and eyes. You proved
you’d been in vaudeville with those photographs
of you on stage and posed in taffeta
and velvet costumes that your mother made
(before the carriage dragged her to her death).

You went on tour before you turned fifteen,
that diamond in your smile no doubt the work
of dentist brother – Al? or Harry, George,
or Julius. . .brothers vanished into scrapes,
or other towns.
                            Then Ringling Brothers took
you on; you danced a sideshow serpentine.
Your china eyes and bisque complexion gained
the love of ring announcer, dashing Brad,
a courtship on the circus train’s caboose.
But Brad had run away before – to war,
the minstrel show, and now the circus life –
one day he ran away again, from you.
What yellow fever couldn’t take from him,
he’d lose at Hialeah. . . .
                                             Evil words
were not your way. I can’t say all you were. 
You loved us all, each generation’s black-
sheep boy the most. Of course John Frederick brought
you and your children home. He taught your girl
to waltz and nursed her past the Victory flu.
He made a worker of your elder boy
and left the world to work and love and you.

Amanda

Your father loved a waltz and grew the grapes
for his own heavy wine. You loved a boy
whose bride could only come from Italy.
In time you married Emil, coarse and drunk
enough to keep at home. The Great War came,
and sales of German-language news and ads
no longer kept John Frederick’s home afloat.
The family dog called Kaiser finally left –
he joined the troops camped down the old Rock Road.

Your town was nothing but a streetcar loop
outside the City Limits, ripe for sweet-
heart deals between the factories and the gang.
The neighborhood went Irish. John Frederick
died – you sold the calf but kept his house,
its privy under code by any rules.

You worked the precinct while, with hat in hand,
the mayor junketed to Asia well
before the fashion. Thanks to you, the dolls
he brought from China and Japan were mine.
Like Pearl, you had no children of your own.
Her Johnny ran insane, was taken in
at County. Your Emil spat himself to death.

We gave you Christmas dinner, drove you back
and forth. You slept until we came. Then while
we stood, you wrapped some thrift-store slip
or scarf in last year’s box. Your barbs were your
protection, saved for dinner, passed around
with Della’s pickles in the dining room.

Back in the Loop, the neighborhood went black
and stayed Democratic; you still worked
the polls. When death and the bulldozer came,
who recognized John Frederick’s rural place,
his German arbor by the streetcar loop?
All gone, except in your last look of scorn.

Text and poems © 2011 Nanora Sweet