Zombies Invade the Southside! New Book by Walter A. Schroeder

Hi, everyone, it's Julie, the daughter of Walter. He's the author of this blog, but I'm the one who posts his essays here online. I'm also the editor of his publications for the Old Munichburg Association, and I wanted to let you know he has a new collection of memoirs!

We just picked up the books from the printer a few days ago. Are we in time for Christmas? Not quite, but Downtown Book & Toy and J Street Vintage will soon have copies for sale. I'm sure there will be other places, as well. We are also anticipating some booksignings and perhaps some public author talks, too.

Why is it called “Zombies”? you may ask. Well, this is collection of essays about a number of different topics. Would people pay attention if it was titled “More Essays by Walter”? We went with a title that grabs your attention. So: the title comes from a whimsical story about the time when all the kids on the block saw the 1943 comic-horror movie Revenge of the Zombies . . . and then spent the next week staggering around the neighborhood's sidewalks, arms outstretched, wearing vacant expressions—causing passing motorists to do double-takes! Worse, as they muttered "I will do thy bidding. . ." their mothers caught on to the trick and told them to clean their rooms, or do the dishes!

But perhaps more to the point, it has to do with the magic of details. In his introduction, my dad talks about how “history” comes to us as a collection of facts, but we all have a hard time picturing how things really “were.” His goal in Zombies is to revive scenes of the past so we can better understand and imagine what Jefferson City was like (at least for him) in the 1940s. (Was his experience “representative”? Well, if not his, whose would be?) As he explains, “In every generation . . . young people learn only the skeleton of the past. I want to put meat on the skeleton’s bones.”

In other news:

• Dad's book Buddy's Stories, published in 2018 by the Old Munichburg Association, sold out this year, so we reprinted it. So it's still available, too!
• His Breweries and Saloons book is also available. It's a relatively small book, but it's packed full of interesting information about the early breweries and saloons/taverns in Jefferson City. Sure, it's got lots of cool photos, old ads from the local German newspapers, and other illustrations, but it's also got a lot of colorful information in the text—the text is substantial, so don't let its compactness fool you. Be sure to check it out!
• Dad's book Southside Sketches, published in 2016, is now out of print and unavailable.

One more note: Zombies, Buddy's Stories, and Breweries and Saloons are all published by the Old Munichburg Association, which is a nonprofit neighborhood association dedicated to the revitalization of Jefferson City's historic Southside. We are a group of homeowners, business owners, and others who share a love of the district and a desire to promote, preserve, and protect it. Proceeds from the sales go to OMA.

This Mother and Son Will Not Be Remembered Unless I Write This

Sometimes I wonder if people who have gone quietly about living good, decent lives will ever be remembered for having lived their good, decent lives. Here is a story of a devoted mother and her only child that was told to me by my mother.

In the first decade of the 1900s, Katharine and Johann Saar were members of the German Methodist Church on the corner of Broadway and West Elm, in the Munichburg neighborhood of Jefferson City. My grandparents, who lived next door to the church, were also members of that small congregation.



The Saars lived less than a block away in the smallest brick house I have ever seen. It measures not more than 12 x 24 feet. Remarkably, it is still standing in good shape with few modifications, like the addition of an indoor bathroom. It sits alone on its own very small piece of land behind the Schaefer House, 618 Broadway, with hardly any yard; parking and driveways surround the house.



Made of soft, porous brick, this little house was probably built in the 1890s. It had only two very small rooms, each about 10 x 10 feet with separate flues, and a microscopic attic above. Today it still serves as a residence. Sadly, the inconspicuous house was overlooked when the grander neighboring buildings facing directly on Broadway and Dunklin were put on the National Register of Historic Places as the Munichburg Historic District. It should have been included.

In 1901 the Saars’ daughter, Marie, married Franz Pietsch, which is pronounced “peach,” just like the fruit. The Pietsches had a son, their only child, Paul, born soon after.

Franz Pietsch, reportedly a railroad worker, died shortly after little Paul’s birth. Marie Pietsch was left to raise her son by herself. Those were tough times for a widow. Marie moved with baby Paul into the tiny brick house to live with her also widowed mother. Somewhat later, Katharine Saar moved south to the Brazito community, leaving Marie Pietsch and young Paul alone in the tiny house.

In order to make a living, Marie Pietsch took the job of charwoman, or scrub woman, at the old U.S. Post Office on High Street, which was across the street from today’s Arris’ Pizza Palace. My mother described to me how Mrs. Pietsch not only wet-mopped the rooms of the building but also got down on her hands and knees and hand scrubbed all the steps—cleaning them of spat tobacco juice and whatever else. Those steps were used every day, winter and summer, by hundreds of people. Everyone using those steps literally looked down upon her as just a simple scrubwoman. There was no more menial job in public sight, but Marie had a child to raise.



Paul attended Jefferson City schools and turned out to be a stellar student. He graduated from the high school in 1919 no less than class valedictorian and champion debater. He received the coveted A. M. Hough Medal given annually to the student who ranked highest in scholarship. According to the yearbook, his fellow students voted him the “greatest athlete.” Within a few years out of high school he had a respectable Missouri state government position as an assistant chemist. Marie Pietsch must have taken great pride in her son, having risen from such humble circumstances, and he, in turn, must have thought the world of his devoted mother.

In 1930, Marie Pietsch was the only non-family person at my parents’ wedding one block away on Elm Street. Mrs. Pietsch assisted my grandmother with the wedding reception for her daughter. Grandma’s and Marie’s friendship was based on their earlier years in the German Methodist Church. My mother blushingly admitted to me that she had had a teenager’s crush on the neighborhood boy Paul—handsome, smart, athletic—who was just a couple years older. Paul did not attend her wedding.

World War II came in 1941. Paul, still single at age thirty-nine, entered U.S. military service. Then no one heard anything more about him. When asked, Mrs. Pietsch, now living alone in that tiny house, said he was doing “just fine” and had not been sent overseas.

Mrs. Pietsch died while the war was still raging. She died alone. All alone. According to my mother, the U.S. military would not allow Paul to come home from wherever he was for his own mother’s funeral and burial. Not a single family member was there to mourn Marie, the devoted mother who scrubbed the post office steps on her hands and knees.

You see, Paul had a supersecret job with military intelligence, and he was so indispensable to the war effort that, though he was still in this country, he was not allowed any time off, not even for his mother’s funeral. That bothered my mother very deeply. As a mother herself, she imagined how grieving Paul must have been not to be able to say goodbye to his dear mother.

I don’t know what happened to Paul Pietsch after the war, but he did not return to Jefferson City. So this story has to end here.

I think about him and his mother whenever I see that tiny brick house, and I wonder if the devoted mother Marie Pietsch and Paul, her high-achieving son, are ever remembered by anyone else.

Now that I have told you their story, you can remember them, too.

Copyright 2013 by Walter A. Schroeder.

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IF YOU LIKED THIS ESSAY, YOU'LL WANT TO READ MORE IN WALTER SCHROEDER'S

Southside Sketches: Essays on Jefferson City’s Old Munichburg
200 pages, paperback
$12 (available at Downtown Book & Toy, the ECCO Lounge, J Street Vintage, and the Schaefer House, all in Jefferson City, Missouri)

Civilian Defense Corps and Air Raids in Jefferson City

The U.S. government responded to the early, spectacular successes of the Japanese and Nazi Germans at the beginning of World War II by creating the Office of Civilian Defense on May 20, 1941. This office was to protect Americans from the possibility of enemy bombing of our towns and cities. Clifford G. Scruggs, the lumber dealer, was the chairman of the Jefferson City Council of Civilian Defense and was in charge of administering the executive order locally.

My dad, age 38 when the war began, had been given a 3-A (exempt) classification for military service. My mom jokingly said it was because he had flat feet, but then she quickly added that he was the sole provider for five other persons, including his two young sons (my brother Richard and me) and Mom’s German-born parents who lived with us. With civilian status, Dad was expected to do his duty by civilian service. To do this, he became an air raid warden with the local Office of Civilian Defense.

Looking back seventy years ago, it seems incredible that we believed that Japanese and German Nazi planes could penetrate so deep into the heart of the continent to reach Jefferson City, Missouri, without being intercepted somewhere along the way. Nevertheless, at the time we took the possibility seriously . . . very seriously.

The kids on West Elm Street, six to eleven years old, learned how to identify enemy airplanes from silhouettes of them published in the newspaper and on the back sides of breakfast cereal boxes. (Airplane identification cards also came in packs of cigarettes, but no one in our family smoked.) With our binoculars we surveyed the skies, lying on the steep, grassy terraces or peering out of second- and third-story windows. We were sure we would spot a German Stuka or Messerschmidt or maybe a “Jap” Mitsubishi or Zero and save Jefferson City from air attack.

The Office of Civilian Defense distributed leaflets about preparation for air attacks: “Read and Save this Leaflet—it may Save Your Life Some Day!” The city held air raid drills to practice what to do. It was important to extinguish all lights inside houses, so that the enemy planes could not find anyplace to bomb. So we had to put out all lights in the house and pull all the window shades shut. We were not allowed to use any matches or flashlights outside. People were not even allowed to light a cigarette in the open. All streetlights were extinguished. If you were driving, you had to stop immediately, turn off the lights, and park close to the curb, but not at any intersection or fire hydrant. Police and firemen could use their headlights, but their headlights had to be mostly covered, leaving only a slit to allow a little light through. Detailed rules were in place for those caught in theaters and other meeting places at time of an air raid. We were also instructed, should an attack actually occur, to seek cover under a large table or under an overturned sofa. “Carelessness or negligence in observing these precautions may invite disaster.”

 

 Newspapers also printed information about what to do when an attack comes. Since gas was a dreaded weapon in World War I, there was fear it could be used again. In case of gas attack, we were to close doors tightly, stuff cracks, avoid the basement, and retreat into the attic. If we were caught outside, we were to cover our mouths and noses with damp handkerchiefs and “walk against the wind to get in the clear quicker. Above all, keep your head. Running around wildly results in much greater danger to yourself.”

 

 To be an air raid warden, Dad had to take a training course. It consisted of eight sessions, taught in evenings at the Junior College (now the Miller Performing Arts Center). He learned about chemical warfare, high explosives, incendiary bombs, and how to keep civilian morale up.

 

 Each session included first aid instruction, including how to care for casualties of gas bombs. “It is the responsibility of the Air Raid Warden to see that everything possible is done to protect and safeguard the homes and citizens within his area from the hazards created by attacks from the air.” On December 12, 1942, the class received certification of membership in the United States Citizens Defense Corps as air raid wardens. Dad was now an official air raid warden!
 

Jefferson City was divided into geographic areas for air warden patrol. Each area comprised about 500 persons. Dad was assigned to Lafayette Street between McCarty and Dunklin and connecting streets, the neighborhood known as “The Foot” of Lincoln University. It contained the black business district and many residences of both blacks and whites.

When an air raid drill was called in the evening, Dad put on his sleeve identification band, picked up his flashlight, and walked the eight blocks from our house on West Elm Street to Lafayette. He looked at all the windows of the businesses and houses to make sure no light was visible from the street. He told those walking on the sidewalk that they should go inside a building and those with cigarettes to put them out or go inside.

My brother and I waited up in our darkened house with all the window shades drawn until he returned to find out what was going on. He never reported anything unusual. He said that everyone was in full compliance with the regulations. We were actually kind of disappointed that no enemy planes had been spotted flying over Jefferson City. It had been just another drill.

 

 As 1942 turned into 1943 and then into 1944, the probability of enemy air attack on the 48 United States greatly lessened, although we kids still occasionally surveyed the skies looking for enemy planes. The Japanese temporarily occupied Attu in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and sent some incendiary balloons over Oregon, and German U-boats were sighted off the East Coast, but we in Jefferson City felt safe from air attack.

Dad, however, retained his air warden status and participated in more air raid drills. It was not until June 4, 1945, a month after Germany had surrendered on May 8, that the Office of Civilian Defense was terminated by executive order and Dad put his air raid warden sleeve band away. Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945.

Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.

Missouri Sales Tax Tokens

Suppose you went to the gas station today and bought one gallon of gas advertised at $3.299 a gallon. The clerk would expect you to pay $3.30 and would not give you back any change. But that’s not the way it was when we had mills for tenths of cents.

When we went to the Capitol Movie Theatre in the 1940s, a ticket for kids under the age of twelve cost 10 cents and 2 mills. Without the 2 mills, Mr. Arnold Gould would not let us in. If we gave the ticket seller 11 cents, she gave us 8 mills in change. The 2 mills were for the sales tax that Mr. Gould had to remit to the state of Missouri.




A mill is one-tenth of a cent, or one-thousandth of a dollar (it’s from the Latin word mille, which means “thousand”). Missouri had a state sales tax of 2 percent and issued sales tax tokens to help collect the tax when it came to tenths of cents. If you wanted to buy some dress material at the Southside Dry Goods Store, and Mr. Schmidt’s price for it was $3.70, he would add on the state sales tax of 7.4 cents, so the total bill would be $3.77 and 4 mills. You either gave him the 4 mills, or you gave him another penny and he gave you back 6 mills change.

Beginning in August 1935, Missouri issued tokens in 1-mill and 5-mill values in order to collect the sales tax. They were made of thin cardboard and called “milk-cap tokens” because they looked like the cardboard caps that were used for glass milk bottles.








Then Missouri tried metal tokens, which were slightly larger than a nickel, but thinner. They were lightweight, dull, and ugly and would never be mistaken for a coin. The 5-mill token had a hole in the center. Boys tried to use them in pinball machines, but they jammed the coin slot.






When World War II came, all metal went for the war effort, so Missouri turned to plastic tokens. The 1-mill token was bright red, and the 5-mill token bright green. The plastic easily warped, even under slight heat like sitting out in the sun, but even if they were curled, Mr. Gould accepted them at the Capitol Theatre.

They were useless for pinball machines! We boys laid them on the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks when we heard a train coming and watched the train’s wheels flatten them into half-dollar size.




Inflation after the war caused prices to rise quickly, and separate tokens for tenths of cents fell out of favor. Merchants didn’t like to fool around with tenths of cents, which required doing long multiplication on a piece of paper, so they simply rounded the sales tax to the nearest whole penny. This is what is done today when you buy gas at the gas station. Shoppers were glad not to have to fool around with a separate set of coins in their pockets and purses.

Missouri finally got rid of its sales tax tokens in 1961. It was the last state to do so!

Are Missouri sales tax tokens worthy anything today? So many millions were produced, and they were made so cheaply, that their value is trivial today. Collectibles dealers often sell them in boxes with miscellaneous paraphernalia.




The mills (and the milk jug cap!) in the pictures are from my collection. Some of the information was taken from the website of the American Tax Token Society.


Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.

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It’s not very taxing to join the Old Munichburg Association! New memberships cost just $25 (and no mills!)—click here for a membership form!

Madison Street Becomes US Highway 54, and Central Dairy Becomes a Destination

Madison Street Becomes Highway 54

When planners laid out the first streets of Jefferson City in 1822, they made Jefferson Street the chief north-south road. Jefferson Street was anchored on its river end at the steamboat landing (Lohman’s Landing, now part of Jefferson Landing State Historic Site). The street extended in a straight line to the southern limits of the platted city, where it became a state road that went far out into the county. During the nineteenth century, farmers from Zion, Honey Creek, Brazito, Hickory Hill, Stringtown, Lohman, and other rural communities came in their wagons into Jefferson City along Jefferson Street as far as the German Southside (Munichburg), where they traded and stayed overnight.

Just after the Civil War ended in 1865, brothers Oscar and Nelson Burch built impressive, adjacent residences on the high ground of the 900 block of Jefferson Street on south edge of the German-immigrant Munichburg community.

The Oscar Burch house.

The Nelson Burch house.

In 1893 Louis Lohman built his elegant mansion on wooded acreage across Jefferson Street from the Burch residences. These three historic houses, all sitting high in the “suburbs,” had fantastic views of the city. The Lohman mansion has since been razed by the Salvation Army.

The Lohman mansion, prior to 1922.

In the 1920s, when cars and trucks replaced wagons and buggies, the federal government created a system of numbered highways and designated Jefferson Street as US Highway 54 in this new highway system.




Jefferson Street, however, soon presented challenges to increased motor traffic. Its public right-of-way south of Atchison Street narrowed from 80 to merely 50 feet, and houses pressed close up to the street. Also, the steep hill leading up to Swifts Highway was difficult to negotiate for heavy-laden trucks, like those heading south for construction of Bagnell Dam. The Missouri Highway Department realized Jefferson Street was obsolete for highway traffic and had to find another location to carry US 54 traffic.

In 1937, during the Great Depression and using what we would now call federal stimulus dollars, the Missouri Highway Department selected Madison Street, one block east, to be the location for a new Highway 54 South. At that time, Madison Street dead-ended at the end of the flat stretch in the 1000 block, just beyond where Freeman’s Mortuary now is. In this flat stretch, the public right-of-way could easily be widened, because the west side was all in Lohman’s Woods and not built on. Beyond the flat stretch was a steep hill that Capital Region Medical Center now sits atop. The Highway Department concluded it would be better to blast a roadway through the crown of that steep hill, where there were no buildings. Making a deep rock cut in the crown would reduce the street ascent and lower the street grade. This is the same hill that Jefferson Street went up and over at Swifts Highway.




Work was delayed until 1941. To blast such immense quantities of rock was something to behold because blasting on that scale was not common in those days. Few people wanted to go close to the site when the dynamiting was going on. From a couple blocks away you could see large rocks being thrown high in the air during the blasting, and folks feared rocks would shower down on their heads. Indeed, some nearby residents did find small rocks in their yards. There wasn’t much “crowd control” for safety in those days, and people, if they dared to, could venture quite close to such hazardous events, restrained only by their own common sense, or lack of it. My family could hear the dynamite explosions one mile away at our house on West Elm Street.

One Sunday, when no work could be done on the Sabbath day of rest, and a day when Dad was free, he took my brother Richard and me (I was seven years old) to see the progress. But Dad had a special interest. Labor unions had vigorously objected to the work on some grounds and had caused its start to be delayed for four years. Dad was a strong supporter of unions and president of Jefferson City’s Central Labor Union when this particular highway work began in 1941. He wanted to see firsthand what the controversy involved. With a violent war well underway in Europe, there was a shortage of male labor for the highway work and perhaps non-union labor was being used. That was a serious concern to the labor unions. But it sure didn’t concern us young boys.

That sunny Sunday afternoon, we walked to the end of Madison Street just past where Freeman’s Mortuary now is. There we left the city sidewalk and stepped carefully along the partially graded rock surface all the way up the hill to the top. No grading had begun beyond that place, and the rocks lay in great jumbled masses like the boulder field atop Pikes Peak (which I had seen in pictures; I imagined we were walking to the top of Pikes Peak). We picked our way among the sharp-edged limestone boulders and walked to the foot of the jagged face of a freshly dynamited fifteen-foot cliff to inspect bedrock that was gleaming bright white in the afternoon sun.

Richard and I found fossils that had just been exposed to daylight for the first time in millions of years, while Dad stood with his hands on his hips, staring blankly at nothing in particular, but thinking deeply about this and that. When we turned to look north and head back home, the vast panorama of Jefferson City lay before our eyes with masses of white limestone boulders that were soon to be transformed into a modern highway. For me, it was much too soon to leave “Pikes Peak.” I could have stayed among those white boulders for a long time.




The new, wide Madison Street carrying Highway 54 South was finished in late 1942, right smack in the middle of World War II. Jefferson City now had a concrete highway for five and a half miles to the Moreau River (to the crossing now called Twin Bridges), and I had personally witnessed its construction!


Central Dairy Becomes a Destination

When Madison Street became Highway 54, properties along it benefited from increased tourist traffic, due especially to the booming Lake of the Ozarks after World War II ended. Southside Conoco gas station arose on the corner of Madison and Dunklin, and Southside Sinclair arose on the corner of Madison and Ashley. Milo Walz developed a shopping center in the block of Madison between those two service stations, where Show Me Printing and Dollar General now are.

But it was Central Dairy that benefited most from the highway traffic. Before Madison became US 54, Central Dairy was already a favorite place to us locals, but when highway traffic began passing by, it became a destination for all those summer tourists on their way to and from Lake of the Ozarks who wanted some good ice cream.




The new highway made Central Dairy what we know it today—one of Jefferson City’s primary destinations. But even later, after Madison was no longer US 54, travelers kept detouring off the new highway onto Madison in order to reach Central Dairy and their wonderful ice cream and friendly service. Fame then spread to other tourists coming to Jefferson City.




Madison Street lost its designation as US 54 in 1965 when the Highway Department constructed the present dual-lane US 54 that cuts through the hill at the Jefferson Street overpass.






The next time you drive around that abrupt, sharp curve in the highway, remember that it is the third generation of US 54 leading south from Jefferson City.

Copyright 2011 by Walter A. Schroeder.

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Jefferson City is a wonderful place, and Old Munichburg is an integral part of its story. Help preserve and promote this German-settled district by joining the Old Munichburg Association!