Light Years Await: Memoirs of Rudy J. Gerber

By Rudy J. Gerber

What it was like to be a lawyer judge and academic in the last half of the 1900s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781663210043

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Copyright © 2020 (Rudolph) Rudy J. Gerber.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-1003-6 (sc)

            978-1-6632-1004-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020918797

iUniverse rev. date: 11/17/2020

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Rudy Gerber

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Dedication

To my grandkids, present and future:

Ethan Pieroni

Frankie Pieroni

Cole Mone

Will Mone

Jefferson Muller

And those to come…..

Nunc scio quid sit amor

Virgil

G

Augustine described memoirs as roaming through the spacious halls of memory. To Mark Twain memoirs searched the dusty chambers of our memories. Interested family members may roam through these dusty eras when my family and friends lived to see what life was like in those days. People will not look forward to posterity who do not look back on their ancestors, said Edmund Burke. Perhaps life’s secret lies not in grand events but in parentheses between little ones. Welcome, then, to the parentheses between eras that are more important than the personal pronoun.

Maybe no one should write memoirs until they’re dead, so I have nothing to say here but am saying it anyway, but only once. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. My calendar days are numbered.

Other Beginnings

Though my birth came in October, 1938, my pre-birth was also formative, though my ancestors, aside from my parents, were mostly unknown.

My father, Rudolph Vogt Gerber, was born in St. Louis, Mo. in 1907. As his name suggests, though born and raised in this country, he possessed German heritage, with Vogt ancestral roots in northwestern Germany near Denmark. His father, Rudolph Matthias Gerber, a druggist, ran a pharmacy in north St. Louis on Easton boulevard, then a proper middle-class neighborhood. Rudolph Mathias also came from German forebears. His father, George Jacob, hailed from centuries of Gerbers still living today in Balingen in the German southwest near the Swiss border. He came to St. Louis in 1858. His ample mother, Francesca Mueller, came from Neusatz, Germany. Our Frankie and Jay can perhaps relate to her, at least by name. Folks then often married into their same gene pool, wiser for sharing culture than heredity.

In addition to being a druggist, Rudolph Matthias also worked as a carpenter and knew how to set off fireworks, with the Gerber trait of being a jack of all trades. In 1905 he married Emily Vogt in St. Louis. Soon dad was born, a bittersweet birth. His mother died giving birth to him, so he never knew her. He may have felt guilt by seeming to cause her death, though he never said so. Her death explains why he received Vogt as a middle name.

Cole might be especially interested in these diverse influences on his middle name. Emily’s surviving siblings (two sisters had also died early) were a brother William and two sisters, Paula and Louise, all named Vogt. Great uncle William became a prominent OBGYN doctor in St. Louis. His wife, Jeannie Nichols, a tall matron with a Teutonic countenance as severe as that of her husband, may have hailed from Millstadt, Illinois, but that is uncertain. She descended from an unknown, unsearchable relative who supposedly signed the Declaration of Independence. They had one doctor son, William Hans Vogt, Jr., named after his father. He became an uncle to me.

When Emily died, the Vogt family encouraged dad’s widowed father, Rudolph Matthias Gerber, to live in their house with them. In 1915 he too died of heart problems, orphaning dad at the age of nine. As these early deaths suggest, the median life-span in 1900 was about 50 years, well below today’s norm. The fertility rate among women was about seven, and the median age of the population was sixteen. The nation’s fertility rate now is barely two, the average life expectancy approaches eighty, and the median age is 36 and rising. Our country is becoming older, less populous, and living longer.

The Vogt family took my orphaned dad into their house and raised him as their son, with their own son Bill becoming less a cousin and more a brother. Louise Vogt, his aunt, who remained unmarried after a fiancé committed suicide, assumed a role of surrogate mother. She was enthusiastic for family bonds. When dad started losing his hair in early high school, she and her sister Paula would rub his head for long periods to stimulate the hair roots and enhance handsomeness. It didn’t work; he was totally bald by his early twenties. Esau was a hairy man but dad was smooth. Baldness is always neatly coiffed; being bald at a young age gave meaning to balderdash. When I saw his ample chest hairs, I encouraged him to comb those hairs over his head.

Aunt Dease cooked Saturday night dinners for our family in her apartment well into the 1950s, continuing a German pattern of women attending to men. Dad was served by women for much of his life, hindering him from learning tasks he considered female.

Dr. Vogt often took dad along on his house calls in St. Louis, where they admired city monuments and looked for dead horses. From these outings dad acquired a love of St. Louis and a liking for driving about its streets. For him the city was a magical place, the center of the nation.

During 1920-1940 the Vogt family lived on Lotus avenue in north St. Louis in a large house, now demolished, with automobiles and hired help, including an employee who maintained their Model T Ford and a later black Cadillac. The family, which had some money, was politically conservative. Were they alive now, they would not be fans of Democrats. The younger family members addressed the parents with the German titles Opa and Oma.

Dad and his surrogate brother were sent to the Catholic Jesuit high school in the city, though no one in the family was Catholic. Bill Vogt Jr. was sent on to a medical degree at St. Louis University where a plaque on the wall commemorates his and his father’s professional contributions to that school. The family financed dad’s college studies through the University of Missouri, originally in pre-med and eventually in journalism. Dad transferred out of pre-med because he disliked dissections of animals.

At the university, where everyone dressed in suits and ties, dad had a favorite eccentric journalism prof who wore a red rose stuck into his thick curly hair. He told of a prank he and his friends played on another student who had left on a school break with his model T left parked on a school lot. Dad and his friends took it apart and moved it piece by piece to the absent student’s dorm room. On return he found it fully assembled and parked by his bed, requiring dissembling it, a task left to the owner. Dad graduated from the university in 1932, at the start of the great depression.

Despite the depression the extended Vogt family took occasional summer vacations in Chicago in the 1930s. Their last elegant house was west of Forest Park on Arundel Place, near Washington University, where I cut front and back yard grass for them, mostly for Aunt Jeanne, by the late 1940s a widow.

Mom’s Family

Our mother’s family differed religiously and financially from that of dad but with similar parental death trauma. Her dad was Richard Bauer, another German descendent, with roots in Westphalia in northern Germany near Holland. In 1866, his father, Simon Bauer, left Germany to seek his fortune in America, setting sail at age 19 on a steamer from Bremen to Boston. En route he fell in love with a 16-year old Irish maid from Sligo, Ireland, Mary Murray, who was fleeing the Irish potato famine in County Leitrim. Midway in the crossing they decided they knew each other well enough, after three days, to get married by the ship’s captain. Whether they spoke their speedy romance in German or Irish is unknown but talking must have been a challenge. Despite ethnic, language and religious differences, the marriage lasted. Mary became an Irish island in a sea of Germans.

The couple made their way by train west to Chicago and, after the great fire of 1871 would have destroyed their house but for a fortunate wind change, moved down river to Quincy, Illinois, where their son, Richard Bauer, my mom’s dad, eventually met Teresa Geise, another German descendant, who became mom’s mother. The Geise family, well established in heavily-Germanic Quincy, founded and operated the German Savings Institution, a major bank. Members of that same family also ran the longstanding Maid Rite drive-in there, featured in 2011 on the Food Channel.

Richard and Teresa produced a brood of royalty: a son named Richard and four girls named after queens: Catherine, Regina, Isabel, and Elizabeth, all born at home, common in those days. They were called King Richard and the four queens. One of these queens, Isabel, became my mother.

The Bauer family was very Catholic. The church gave meaning, discipline and comfort to their lives, especially in times of difficulty. Richard Bauer’s sister Helen became a Holy Cross nun under the name Sister Leonita. She visited our house once, wearing a medieval nun’s habit, black, with a large white wimple tightly circling her face. She was ample and jovial, like Chaucer’s nun in the Canterbury Tales. Her habit hid the rest of her body to show only the front of her face, with no hair to be seen. She was a rigid Catholic regarding education. Later, she disapproved me attending Columbia University because it was not a Catholic college. In her later life she was assigned to St. Mary’s College adjacent to Notre Dame. She is buried in the sisters’ cemetery there.

In 1928, like so many other relatives in that period, Teresa Geise Bauer, never very strong, died at the age of 52 from influenza and diphtheria, big killers then, leaving Richard Bauer a widower raising the five children by himself. At the time of his wife’s death he contacted a distant relative named Anton Baur (not Bauer) in St. Louis and discussed working in his stone business. Working in the Geise Maid Rite drive-in didn’t materialize.

To take the stone job Richard moved the five children to Humphrey Street in the south side inner city of St. Louis, a middle class blue collar neighborhood. With only a few years of grade school education, his employment opportunities were limited. For the rest of his life he was a brick and stone worker, cutting stone by hand with heavy hammers and chisels, in a big stone yard on Vandeventer Avenue in the south-central city. He carved a brick church statue that our parents kept in their flower garden wherever they lived, a memento of his craft. He may have contributed to my liking for stonework.

The very intelligent Bauer girls received only a high school education. With the exception of their brother Richard Bauer Jr., who won a football scholarship, no funds were available for college. Mom’s first job after high school was as a clerk at a Woolworth store for $1.25 a day, where a pound of candy then cost 20 cents. This was the depression; few good jobs were available in the 1930s.

Of the genetic grandparents, the only one I knew even minimally was mom’s dad, who died in April, 1942, a month before my brother Dick was born. He lived in his old age with my aunt Elizabeth’s family in south St. Louis, sharing a bedroom with cousin Skip. Mom told me she was going to the hospital to say good-bye to him, distressing me to hide under the bathroom sink. Pictures show him hunched over in chairs in the back yard, with a kind but stern face, unsmiling. He had lost one eye when a piece of stone smashed into it during his stone cutting. Losing his wife and working as a stonecutter to support himself and five children carved deep lines into his stony face.

Aunt Dease

The surrogate grandparent we all knew well and loved was Louise Frederika Vogt, born in north St. Louis in 1875, a decade after the end of the Civil War, during the peak of American, English and German Romanticism in music and literature. She fit well into that tradition. She was dad’s aunt, sister of his deceased mother, who became his substitute mother. I named her Aunt Dease because of mispronouncing Louise as a youngster.

The extended family picked up that name. She was kind, generous but parsimonious, blessed with family values, plus a liking for German Ordnung. She was always positive: You have much to be thankful for; you still have your good health, plus Do your best and leave the rest. She was romanced by a young medical doctor who, for other reasons, committed suicide, perhaps generating her liking for the operetta The Merry Widow. In 1909 she attended the Veiled Prophet ball in St. Louis, a top social event, with a dance list of potential suitors. Like Aunt Catherine, mom’s sister, Aunt Dease never married and seemed happy with that decision.

At her apartment she regularly played romantic classical pieces on her grand piano, including Liebestraum and the Blue Danube. After her heavy dinners, her piano cadences mingled hypnotically with the ornate circles of her heavy old carpet. Her soothing piano playing recalls Lenin’s remark about listening to Beethoven: he’d have to resist listening to it, he said, if he wanted to start a revolution. Her after-dinner piano entertainment on our full stomachs often put us to sleep on her overstuffed sofa in her always-overheated apartment in north St. Louis. Beethoven’s Fur Elise brings her to mind.

On Thursdays she’d take the Delmar and City Limits streetcars to our house for dinner. Afterwards we’d drive her back to her apartment on Clemens avenue, an old street named for Mark Twain dating from Civil War days, with stepping stones at curbs for horse - drawn buggies. When she visited she’d usually bring German coffeecake, a Stolen. She did her shopping on foot; she never owned or operated a car. At our Exeter house she tried to teach us kids the piano, which I resisted, prompting her to warn me, correctly, that I would regret it later in life. She was a competent piano teacher with the annoying habit of plunking student fingers forcefully down on the correct keys.

At her apartment, where she’d play the piano for hours at a sitting, a visitor could marvel at her carved grand piano, her German glassware (mugs, wine glasses, china) and an over-the-sofa large water color portrait of well-dressed men and women congregating outside medieval German church buildings. She became frail in her 90s and confused about which Rudy lived in Shrewsbury (dad or me?). Our parents took her into their home as she became frail and tended to her needs until her death. She was able to play the piano until close to her death in 1970 at the age of 95, suggesting longevity genes.

Dad Jobs

After dad graduated from the university with his journalism degree, he was lucky, in an era of high unemployment, to land a job as a newspaper reporter, first for a newspaper in Charlottesville, Va., then in St. Louis to report for a local paper. St. Louis then had three dailies: The Star Times, The Globe Democrat, and The Post Dispatch. Only the last of these three papers remains, a skeleton of what it was a century ago. The city also had an earlier German language newspaper. German was also taught in public schools. The outbreak of the First World War ended both that newspaper and speaking that language.

A great burning of German books and magazines occurred in 1915 because of anti-German sentiment, when speaking German became verboten. The only thing worse than burning books is not reading them. Dad, who spoke German at home up to 1914, when the war began, stopped speaking it at home but continued throughout his life to spout short German phrases, such as Was ist los? Wo bist du? and Nicht in den Wagen spruhen.

After three years as a news writer, covering events like 4th of July hospital reports of fireworks injuries, dad moved into advertising at a large, now-extinct dry goods manufacturing company, Rice - Stix, in the garment district on 10th and Washington streets in downtown St. Louis, where he edited the company newsletter Talking it Up, produced an annual merchandise catalogue, and designed magazine ads for shirts, pants, coats and other dry goods.

Dad enjoyed facially contradictory writing; one of the favorite poems he wrote began this way:

It was midnight on the ocean

Not a stranger was in sight;

The sun was shining brightly

For it rained