Classmate Rich Jones shares his essay on Route 66 - and how it affected his life, a MUST read for any Kirkwood kid who grew up!

 I am honored to present a personal essay written by our classmate Rich Jones. I'm sure his reflections will touch all of you in some way, had me laughing and crying at the same time, sign of a great story.  He promises more too & I'm holding him to it! AND I hope more of you will follow his lead! Our memories are golden, let's share them!  TYOS Rich (That's my new acronym for when I want to thank someone but those 2 words just don't seem like enough, but perhaps Thank You on Steroids gets the point across succinctly!

                                                                     Route 66 & Me

Rich Jones

In September 1959 U.S. Route 66 was still The Main Street of America, The Mother Road, running from Chicago to Santa Monica, California. If you didn’t want to battle the traffic passing through the city of St. Louis, you took Route 66 Bypass, which ran through the center of Kirkwood, my hometown. At a newspaper stand where Route 66 crossed the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks, I started my first job selling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after school. I was eleven years old, just entering 7^th grade. The job allowed me to explore the business center of Kirkwood on my own, without mediation or interpretation by teachers, preachers or parents. What I learned over the next two years opened me up to a world beyond Kirkwood.

Founded in 1865, Kirkwood was a typical mostly white, mostly Republican suburb of St. Louis where I was raised in a modest 20x30 foot 3-bedroom bungalow like millions of others built to accommodate the growing families of returning GIs. Father, mother, older sister—an ordinary family except that my mother worked full time as an office manager of a small advertising firm. In elementary school, I brought home above average grades, but “Rich doesn’t live up to his potential,” the teachers reported on parents’ night, often adding that I was “a disruptive influence in class.” And they were right. I was an awkward, bratty kid who just didn’t seem to fit in. If it were today, I probably would be given some behavior-altering drug.

Mom and Dad were leery at first when a friend recommended me as his replacement at the corner newsstand. Paper boys were unsavory types who would be a bad influence, they said. I persisted, arguing it would be a good experience for me to earn some money on my own. “Bobbie gets money babysitting, why can’t I do this?” The fact that my father was out of work again may have persuaded my parents to change their mind. I was elated. It was not just for the chance to earn money. I dreaded staying at home after school. My mother was always at work, my hard-to-please father would be waiting to pounce on me for some real or imagined transgression, and my high school sister would entertain herself by picking on me. She nicknamed me “Crisco,” fat in the can. Always tense at home, uncomfortable in school, I welcomed the opportunity to be someplace else.

My first week on the job, I stood on the corner watching the cars whizz past, waiting for the red light so I could grab the attention of drivers while they sat fiddling with their radio or lighting up. “Read all about it!” I cried out, mimicking the phrase I had picked up from watching a newsboy hawking The Daily Planet in a Superman episode. I held up the newspapers with the headline visible to entice interest. I sold only one or two papers that way. I delivered a dozen papers to the list of customers in nearby shops, but ended up with at least 15 unsold papers. After a week of disappointment, I began to roam farther from the stand, dropping into shops along the 4-block business district that runs along Bypass 66, AKA Lindbergh Boulevard [AKA Kirkwood Road]. I needed to enlist new customers. I would walk in with the papers under my arm, tell them what the lead story is and show them the front page headline and photo. While they reached into their pocket or purse searching for a nickel, they would ask, "How’re ya doin’ sonny? Whadja learn in school today?" It found it easy to strike up a conversation with grown-ups. I’d smile cheerfully, tell a joke or something about a TV show or movie I had seen. Anything that might engage them. I felt a tiny thrill of victory when I scored a new customer. They liked me! I was no longer that nuisance at school or that bratty kid at home. I began to feel more grown-up.

I discovered things about the town and the people I met. In the beauty salon the acrid smell of chemicals tickled my nose and made me wonder how anyone could endure that all day. At the taxi dispatcher’s office, I saw a framed photo on the wall of a soldier in dress uniform, and listened to the dispatcher’s story about his brother, the one who didn’t come back from the war. I found the tiny office atop the control tower by the train station a place of refuge on cold winter days. There a guy named Hank explained the signaling system that controlled passing freight and passenger trains. When it rained I would duck into the bookstore near my paper stand. I used my earnings to buy my first books there: Carl Sandburg’s three volume boxed paperback biography of Lincoln. The saleslady at the clothing store where I delivered a paper helped me pick out a pair of leather gloves for my mother. On Christmas morning I burst with pride when she opened it, exclaiming, “I bought them with my own money! I hope they fit.” I did not mean for it to make her cry.

That first year selling newspapers helped me at school. It was in civics class that a teacher first encouraged me to think for myself. When we walked into the classroom the first day of class, we read a quotation on the blackboard that said, “Governments are instituted among men….and when the government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” The teacher said, “Get out a pen and paper and comment.” We looked at each other, puzzled. No teacher had ever asked us to think for ourselves. Ten minutes later he asked if we knew the source of that statement. No one raised a hand. None of us recognized that it was from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. He made us think about what “citizenship” means.

I began to really enjoy school for the first time. We talked about current affairs several times every week. Sometimes the topics made me want to read more about them in newspapers. At other times, I felt I knew more than the other kids because of what I had already been reading in the Post-Dispatch. I began to feel as smart as the best students in the class. It gave me a sense of pride I don’t remember having experienced before. I felt comfortable asking a lot of questions, and teachers seemed to like my questions Most of the time.

One question stands out. The previous day’s newspaper headline had read: KHRUSHCHEV VISITS IOWA FARM and the photo showed the Soviet leader in an ill-fitting business suit holding a piglet in his arms. It was an image so contrary to the usual stories about “communist menace” that I mentioned it in class. “How could this dumpy-looking grandfather figure be a threat?” I don’t recall the teacher’s exact response but felt I had somehow violated a strongly held tenet of Cold War patriotism. The fear of Soviet communism would within a year intensify when Khrushchev planted Soviet missiles in Cuba.

In school or on the job, I absorbed stories about the election in 1960, something called “Bay of Pigs” in Cuba, our first man in space, lunch counter sit-ins across the South, a Nazi war criminal captured in Argentina, a mysterious American spy plane shot down by “the Russians,” and the construction of a wall in Berlin. “Read all about it!” was my sales pitch, and it became my own mantra. Newspapers extended my classroom.

I was promoted to the main paper stand a few blocks north where I could earn twice as much. I looked forward to selling on Sunday, a bonus day where I earned more than half the week’s profits. I got up at 6 o’clock, made a full breakfast, then biked to the paper stand before 7 to catch the early church-goers. I would stay until noon to catch the late crowd. Each paper carried thick news, business and sports sections sometimes totaling three pounds. My early adolescent body managed to lift the 25-pound bales dropped off in the morning. Some customers would buy two papers, hand me a dollar, and drive off with a nod before I could give them change. Beyond earning money, I was learning my way around a kitchen, time management, selling skills—all life habits that would serve me well in the future.

The news stand was run by Sam Brick, the kindly old guy who had hired me and would occasionally tip me an extra dollar or two. “Thanks. What’s this for?” I would ask. “Yer doin’ good, kid. Keep it up.” The stand itself was just an enclosed metal box that protected the stack of newspapers from the elements, with a padlocked compartment in the back where I left the day’s cash and Sam kept a small supply of The Racing Form, an 8-page daily with news about horse racing,

Sometimes before he left for the day Sam would hand me an envelope that I was to give to “Frank” who would drive by around 5:30. At other times, “Bill” might swing by, lean across the passenger seat, roll down the window and hand me an envelope with the instruction “Give this to Sam,” and I would dutifully lock it up. This happened often enough to make me ask Mike, one of the older paper boys, “What’s up with the envelopes?” “Sam’s a bookie. Din’chya know?” “No shit!” I blurted out, proud to show off my grown-up language. Racetracks were illegal in Missouri. But not across the river in Illinois where the racetracks were located. Sam’s newsstand was a front for illicit betting, so I must be part of his operation. “Are we in trouble if he’s ever caught?” I asked Mike. “Nah, he’s been doing it for years. Cops probably know all about it. Some of ‘em are probably Sam’s customers.”

My learning the reality of Sam’s side business raised for me more questions and lessons about adult life. Sam was kind to me. I liked him. Should my new-found knowledge of his side business change my opinion of him? I wondered, can you get away with doing illegal stuff if you know the right people? If something is legal in Illinois, can you be arrested for doing the same thing in Missouri where it is not? And if it is illegal, does that then make it immoral? If so, can it be moral there but not here? If so, what makes something moral or not?

Not long after that discovery I missed almost two months of Sunday papers sales to attend the confirmation classes my parents made me go to, even though they never went to church and claimed no specific religious allegiance. I raised some of these questions about law and morality with the young seminarian leading the class. In my youthful impatience for an easy answer, I was probably not satisfied with his responses. But the questions I raised about law and morality would recur in a more concrete way just a few years later during the Viet Nam War, and of course many times more in the decades to come.

I can thank Krushchev for my most profitable, and most memorable Sunday. In August, 1961 bold headlines broke the story of a wall being erected in Berlin. The wall cut the city in half, divided families, and sharply raised the temperature of the Cold War. The Wall seemed abstract and far away until a few weeks later when we were told at school that Mr. McMahon in math and Mr. Brunson in gym would be replaced for the rest of the semester. Their Army Reserve units were being mobilized by President Kennedy to confront the Soviet threat to Berlin.

The following Sunday I was stacking the heavy Sunday papers in advance of the usual morning rush. As the sun has made its way above the trees, chasing away the October morning chill, my ears picked up a low rumbling in the distance. “It can’t be semis,” I thought. “There’s never more than a few passing by on Sunday mornings.” I gazed north towards the sound and detected a line of dark green vehicles creeping towards the center of town heading right down Route 66 towards my newspaper stand. It was an Army convoy—troop carriers, jeeps, and mobile cannons—that stretched back at least half a mile. I had heard the whine of jet fighters streaking overhead on weekends when the Reserves were in training. But I had never seen the Army up close like this, nor heard their relentless grumble so close. Right here through the heart of Kirkwood.

The convoy came to a halt in front of me, the cacophony of grinding diesel engines now gurgling in idle as the convoy waited for the stoplight at Adams Avenue to turn green. “Where’re you headed?” I shouted up to a soldier in the troop carrier. “Fort Leonard Wood,” about 130 miles to the southwest down Route 66. Another soldier shouted down “Hey kid! Er’ them papers fer sale?” “You bet!” I shouted back. Whenever the convey halted at the stoplight, soldiers began flinging down quarters and dollar bills as I passed up one of the heavy Sunday editions after another as fast as I could. I had just enough time before the light changed to hand up three, four or five papers at a time. No one asked for change, not even for a fiver. Every 90 seconds the convoy came to a halt right in front of me. I sold out by 9 o’clock with more than $25 of profit in my pocket.

The drama of the passing convoy made events in the world that I had only read about in the papers seem real. Khrushchev, no longer the grandfatherly figure in Iowa, built the threatening Wall. Kennedy mobilized the Army reserves. These reserves rolled right by me, I talked with them, sold papers to them. and they moved on to Fort Leonard Wood. I saw how their lives were disrupted by the mobilization. I wondered what lay ahead for them. I didn’t know any of them, but they made me see that what happens “out there” beyond Kirkwood can have real consequences.

Just four years later—a quarter of a lifetime for a teenager but a blip for retiree—my classmates and I would learn just how real those consequences would be for us. In 1965 the next president launched a war and called up not just reserves, but eventually young men my age to fight a hot war much farther away than Berlin: Viet Nam. Little did I know then that my abstract question about law and moral relativity asked so innocently in confirmation class would so soon become a personal question of life and death choices for me and millions of other charter members of the Baby Boom generation.

I returned to Kirkwood to attend my 50^th high school reunion, my first time back in thirty-five years. I was glad to see the small house where I grew up still there virtually unchanged but now dwarfed by the mini-McMansion next door. Trees I had climbed were now gone. My favorite sledding hill in the park just a half block from my childhood home on West Madison was replaced by the Kirkwood Ice Arena. A bank parking lot now fills the space where Sam’s newsstand once stood. And U.S. Bypass 66 had been demoted. It lost its federal Route 66 title in 1985, a victim of the Interstate Highway System. But  Kirkwood still proudly calls it “Historic Route 66,” a name that evokes its role as the highway to a new life for millions of Americans.

That name comforts me. It remains part of my history too. At first, the job was about earning money and a chance to venture away from home. By the time I entered high school, I was no longer that under-performing, annoying brat. I was placed in fast track classes and became the first one in my family to graduate from college. I’ve been happily married for fifty-six years with two children, two grandchildren and enjoyed fulfilling careers in academia, international finance, and university fund raising. My road to the adult world began on Route 66.

 Once you finish reading and as you are thinking about this, why not extend your Route 66 thoughts, go here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WHKwUN7nss to watch and listen to a duo playing four hand piano - what else would I post here, of course "Route 66" - the musicians live across the street from us and travel the world most of the year performing their amazing four-hand music!  Sometimes when we are home we can hear them practicing when windows are open and the weather is great!  ENJOY a bit more Route 66 as you digest Rich's great story!