My West Side

By Richard A. Falb

 

I grew up on the West Side of St. Paul. Not West St. Paul, but the West Side of St. Paul. Of course we often referred to our area as the Cherokee Heights Area. I grew up in a rather old house on Ohio Street between Baker and Morton Streets. On Baker Street corner across Ohio Street was a fire station. I think it was Number Twenty One. Of course this occasionally added a little excitement to the neighborhood. We loved to chase the fire engines. I should say I grew up there before World War II. It was time when milk was delivered door to door everyday and almost every area had an ice house, where blocks of ice could be purchased for ice boxes. We did not have electricity in our house early in my childhood. We had gas lights. I remember going down to George and Ohio streets to the only store that had the mantels we had to put on the light. They glowed when we turned on the gas and lit them. When I was young I was always scared of them. I guess I thought they might blow up if you lit them wrong. The stove in our kitchen was a large wood burning stove. I remember chopping wood for that stove. Of course I also remembered the wonderful things that came out of that oven. A coal heater, that sat in the dining room in the middle of the house, heated the house. We used to load the top of it every night and then replenish it in the morning. Needless to say we needed heavy blankets in the upstairs bedrooms where we kids slept. In spite of this I really loved winter because just two blocks East was Baker playground where a large rink was flooded and there was a nice hill to slide on. In addition, about seven or eight blocks in the other direction was Cherokee Park that ran along on the bluffs above the river. Of course those areas were fun to play on in summer also. Baker playground is where we played our pickup football games. It was also the place they played Legion ball and sometimes the High School baseball games. Humboldt High School was just eight blocks east of my house. There were two grade schools one about three blocks one way from my house and the other about two blocks the other way. That one only ran up to fourth grade, it was Bryant School and it was brand new. The other, Douglas, went to eighth grade. It was old when I went there. It no longer exists. The street cars ran along Smith Avenue, just three blocks away in the direction of the Park. That is where our local business district was complete with Jordan's Drugs, Cherokee State Bank, the movie theater, Cherokee Bakery and a large Grocery store. Jordan's Drugs had an Ice Cream Parlor where you could get great malted milks, on the rare occasion you had the money. I think they cost a quarter. Of course we had a small neighborhood grocery store on the corner of Morton and Ohio streets, where on the rare occasion we had a few cents we could get candy or even, if we were really flushed, an ice cream cone. As at that time, fireworks could not be sold in the city limits, we had to go up to Annapolis and Smith, where just over the border in West St. Paul a fireworks store would be set up. To earn money we used to do what was termed as passing bills. This was taking the ads of the local stores and going door to door and sticking them in their front doors. One of the memories of this, is in winter we would pass them in the evening right around supper time. You often could look in and see the table being set for dinner and it looked nice and warm and cozy. It kind of warmed me up. In summer we would head out just beyond Annapolis Street to pick berries at the farms there. Annapolis was only eight blocks south of our house. A mile or so walk would get us out into the farm land. South of Cherokee Park on the Mendota Road it was mostly woods as the road ran along the bluffs. We used to hike out that road to what we termed Second Bridge. It was the second bridge on that road which spanned valleys that cut across the road. Below Second Bridge there as a stream that ran down to the river. There was a place we could build a bonfire and roast wieners and make semores. There was always plenty of dry wood to gather. We used to gather a group of teenagers during the summers and have impromptu picnics. Luckily the girls could talk their mothers out of the wieners, buns and other goodies. There were empty lots at several of the corners in our neighborhood, where we played ball and other games. There was a lot next to the fire house and depending who was the Captain in charge, we could often use it as a playground although we never played ball there. Ohio Street was rounded in the center so there were gutters on both sides running down to a cement catch basin. It was covered by a manhole cover that we could lift. Many a time, we had to lift it to use a rake to rescue a ball that we didn't catch before it went down the drain. Luckily there was a small bit of water where we could use the rake to rescue the ball floating on the water. We got pretty good at it. Of course in Spring and after a heavy rain the gutters were fun places to float stick boats down. Oh we found a lot of interesting things to do for fun around the neighborhood as there were always plenty of kids around when I was growing up. As I was writing this, I was thinking it brought back memories of a rather carefree period of my life in spite of the fact it was in the time of the Great Depression.