I am a second world war school child. My parents bought a new “five room bungalow” on a small lot in a newer part of St. Paul, Minnesota in 1936. It was depression time. My dad was fortunate enough to be manager of a Liggett Company Drug Store on 7th and Robert Streets downtown…..a major sized store with a beautiful interior; a store with marble floors, brass railings with a grand staircase rising up to the mezzanine where the professional druggists, the educated six or seven pharmacists, my dad being one, put together prescriptions. The soda fountain had sixteen stools tending a stunning black marble counter where lunches, coffee, real malted milks, sundaes, sodas, and sandwiches led the list of high quality taste and service. Twelve or more tables for four again shining with black marble tops for the lunch and six o’clock dining crowd.
Ceiling fans kept the air cool and moving.
Beauty mattered in those days. Guys worked 48 hours a week, unmarried gals five days a week, and the married ones with children or no, managed matters at home. They were the stalwarts of their neighborhoods.
My mother worked downtown at the Emporium Department Store. She like being ‘in public’ and was manager of the ladies accessory department there. We needed the money to afford monthly payments on our new house, a $6,000 purchase. I entered grade school in 1938…where Jews were the only minority. When home, they preferred not to mix with others.
It was downtown I met Washington…..the first Negro who entered my life. Since we were so strapped for money…just like nearly everyone else during these depression years, it must have been Spring and Summer when I was four….preschool anyway, when I spent most days downtown with dad at the drug store. Washington was about 25 years old and in charge of maintenance over a staff of about ten. This drug store downtown was a palace. Washington oversaw his staff, but personally handled the cleaning of anything brass….rails and fixtures, and the marble steps going up to the mezzanine.
He, like my dad and all of the other guys, twenty or so who worked there, when in season arrived in the same attire wearing with sport coats and straw hats. People dressed very classy in those days when they went out ‘into public’ as well as worked ‘in public’.
I was told to do as Washington told me….so I helped him polish the beautiful brass railings along the staircase. Kids even those four years old were safe then. Washington took care of me as if he were my dad. I began kindergarten the next year so caretaking downtown wasn’t needed.
I began high school in the late 1940s, a mixed white, Negro public school across town from where I lived where there was no tolerance for the untoward. We all came from families with fathers then.
It was in the 1960s when the Democratic Party under Lyndon Johnson passed AFDC funding which began the destruction of the Negro family, both name and culture, causing the fatherlessness and its savagery so common in today’s Barack Obama’s bossman urban black plantation culture of crime and ignorance.
Enter Baltimore, Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and Black Racism…..and the following:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/05/08/two-college-students-expelled-over-hate-crime-hoax/
Filed under: American Culture, Atheism, Barack Obama, Black Racism, Crime, Family, Fatherlessness, Feminism, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, Racial disorder |
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