Laclede Town

My friend Dominic invited me into a FaceBook group centered on Laclede Town. Laclede Town was a mixed income, federally funded housing experiment that opened in 1964. My family was one of the first to move in.

It attracted counter culture artists and social activists. I remember the whole town getting together at a place that was called either The Coffee House or The Book Store (depending on why you were there) to watch a CBS news special about hippies. Everyone had a great laugh.

Friday nights they would screen old serials and silent movies. My favorites were The Sheik and Son of The Sheik starring Rudolf Valetino.

Across the street from The Coffee House was The Coach and Four Pub. My parents were both bartenders there. Across the street from that was our house, the first one as you entered The Circle.

The Circle was the main gathering place of the community. We had Shakespeare, live music, and art fairs there. In the winter plows pushed snow into it. This created a mountain that Santa used for his throne.

The guy that ran Laclede Town was a guy named Jerry Berger. He was kind of our mayor. I found out later that he was also our Santa.

Our first public swimming pool was a square box of a building that was the Vashon Gym at the corner of Compton and Market. I’ll never forget wading around in the shallow end and feeling a small yellow turd squishing between my toes. The lifeguards laughed. A few years ago I was swimming at the St. Peters Rec Plex and some kid pooped in the water. They closed and drained the whole pool.

In the Laclede Town FaceBook one of the kids I grew up with published a photo of the last piece of the Arch being added. He mentioned a Waring School assembly getting to see it. I was part of that assembly.

When we moved to Laclede Town Waring School wasn’t opened yet. We went to school at Harris Teacher’s College. They put Kindergarten through 4^th grade in one room and 5^th through 8^th in another.

I don’t think they were equipped to deal with us. All we did was copy definitions directly from a dictionary. We used to win bags of candy if we were fast.

I was in 1^st grade. My buddy Jeff Jones sat next to me in the 2^nd grade row. We were pretty much left alone and he taught me cursive handwriting.

By 1967 or 1968 my folks were divorced and we moved. My dad stayed in another part across Laclede called Laclede Park. This gave us access to the Peanut Pool where all the cool people hung out. My band mates Dom and Ben would be lifeguards there. Years later the band would play a political benefit for Eugene McCarthy there. We I turned 18 he was the first presidential candidate I voted for. This was 1976 and I was still too naive and idealistic to vote the lesser of two evils.

We moved back to Laclede Town when I was in 8^th grade but the seeds of decay and racism were beginning to grow. I met Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren at Harris Teacher’s College with my 8^th grade class.

People always seem to compare Laclede Town with “The Village” in the old Prisoner TV series. Strange little houses grouped together in an idealist’s dream of community.

Laclede Town has been totally absorbed by Harris and St. Louis University.

This news paper article from 1966 shows me leaning over a book at Waring School. My buddy Kyle Woods is next to me. It was our bird watching club and we were trying to identify the birds outside the classroom window. We were each given a bird name. I was Meadowlark. I think that’s what endeared me to Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters years later. Oh, by the way, my daughter Chloe turned 13 today (Valentine’s Day). My children are both teenagers now and I’m looking forward to them taking care of me in my dotage.