Memoirs of Norbert E. Gnadinger, Sr. Volume 1

1931

As I slip into the fifth grade, unnoticed, I think, because I had not yet become a dependable or really knowledgeable student. That would occur in the sixth grade. At this time, I believe I was learning more from my reading experiences than I was from my class-room work(?). This is debatable. So, this may be a good time to describe a little more fully the physical make-up of St. Vincent de Paul Church and School. To a little boy, the church and school were very impressive. The school building did not sit exactly on the corner of Shelby and Oak Sts. for Oak St made a curve here on its’ way across the railroad tracks and up to the highlands. In this curve was a small yard next to the school which contained the girls play-yard and West of the yard was the sisters-house, St. Ursula Home(Ursuline Sisters). Directly South of the school building was a large play area for the boys. It contained a covered pavilion in the center and was surrounded by a wrot-iron fence. There was a full basement under the school with two staircases ascending to the first and second floors. There were separate rest rooms for the boys and girls and a large kitchen where the Parent Teachers prepared our lunches. This was a utility basement also used for Socials, Bingos, Meetings and Dances. At the back on each level was a passage-way connected to the Sisters’ House and enclosed so they wouldn’t have to go out into the weather. The first floor contained eight classrooms. At this time we had two classes of each grade and the first floor took care of grades one through four. At the East end facing Shelby St was an entry door leading to a double spiral stairway leading to the street level. On the second floor were nine rooms for grades five through eight and the extra room contained the library and music room and was located over the stairway to Shelby St.

This well-built building is no longer used as a school. It has been remodeled, an elevator built-in and is called the Maloney Center. It contains various offices of the Archdiocese including that of The Record. Also, The “Sister’s” house, named the St. Ursula Convent, has been remodeled and is presently being used as Diocese Offices. The original school building was located directly behind the church and across the alley on Oak St. It was a small two story brick building which could have contained four rooms for classes. Before the depression, it was still being used as a candy factory. They sold hard candies and I was a customer when I had some pennies. Most small businesses at that time sold both retail and wholesale.

St. Vincent de Paul church is now used only on special parishioner occasions such as weddings or funerals. Otherwise, it is closed. I don’t know what eventually will happen to the church building but it is still an impressive, well built structure. You enter through three large doors off Shelby St. Inside, there is an entry room and at each side are stairways to the Choir Loft. Next to the right hand stairway was an entry to the priest house that is next door. I had many happy experiences in this loft while I sang(2nd Tenor or 1st Bass)in the adult Church Choir. The organist and Choir Director was a fine, patient and talented young woman named Cecilia Schmitt, sister to Father Albert Joseph Schmitt, a friend of my brother Robert. As you enter the Nave of the church, the Choir Loft is above your head. Straight ahead, naturally, was the main altar with two side altars. To the left and just short of the side altar was another entrance from Oak St. On the right side in an extension built out from the nave was a small chapel. Also, at this point was a doorway leading to the priest-house. My Pop was a Trustee of the church. I always thought this title was very impressive. He could be trusted. I do know that he took-up the Offertory Collection at the children’s Mass and he helped count and package the money donated. At the time the communion rail was still in place. I was impressed with its’ beauty. It stretched all the way across the width of the church. It had a double swing open gate at each altar and it looked like a beautiful, heavy marble decorated fence. The altar boys, beside serving Mass, were in charge of the gates and the communion cloth which they spread over the communion rail just before and right after communion. I was never smart enough nor serious enough to learn the Latin necessary to serve the priest at Mass. I was involved in many, many celebrations where I wore the robes of a server(altar boy) and marched through church during the celebratory Mass.(1-19-2001)

Do you remember when you first began smoking? I am not positive, but I believe it was in this year of 1931 that I began experimenting through peer pressure. Once again I have to explain that none of we simple people were very aware of health considerations. It was no joke that most of us did bathe once a week most likely on Saturday night in preparation for the Sunday holyday and holiday. We were asked to wash our hands before meals and Mom looked behind our ears to see if we had really washed. We owned no tooth-brushes or tooth-paste. I don’t remember how often we changed clothes during the week. Maybe, only on Sunday. Because of all of these statements, you will more likely be able to understand this one. My friends and I learned to smoke by picking up cigarette butts from the street. This was called “trappin’ butts”. They were free and all you needed was a “kitchen” match and they were plentiful. Are you shocked? No wonder diseases were so wide-spread in those days. Also, by this time, Bernie was well into smoking and his first love was a pipe. He latter graduated to cigars. He had many pipes and since he couldn’t smoke them all at the same time, I confiscated one of them. I was quite a hero with my grown-up “pipe”.

I wasn’t hooked on smoking just yet and I didn’t smoke all the time. A ten year old boy had little money for pipe tobacco. There was always natural leaf tobacco around for that was what Pop chewed at work and Bernie smoked in his pipe most of the time. Have you ever tried to smoke untreated tobacco? Don’t try it. It would burn your tongue and tasted horrible. I liked Prince Albert canned tobacco at the time.(Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Yes! Will you please let him out?)(Home to tobacco-shop telephone humor of the times).(Robert’s son, William H. Gnadinger, Born, Aug. 14, 1931)

I was involved in many sports during these times. The most enjoyable was sleigh-riding down the many hills in the area. Ellison Hill down to Swan St. was closer and was used the most. I swear, it did seem as though we had more and heavier snows in those days and they stayed on the ground longer(?). I guess this seemed true because we used the snow from the time it began falling until it was too slushy to use. School and studying only interfered with our fun. Other great hills we used were Kreiger Hill from Samuel St. to Goss Ave., George Rogers Clark Park Hill just off Poplar Level Rd., Tyler Park Hill next to Baxter Ave. and Cherokee Park Hill(the longest), just up the hill from the present location of the Daniel Boone Statue. We always had a huge “Bon Fire” and there were always a lot of dogs. If you wanted to warm yourself at the “Bon Fire”, you were expected to have brought along some “footins’: to feed the fire.(on foot, you collected tree limbs and wood scraps)(Conrad Steinmetz’s second wife, Mary{Stober}Steinmetz died in 1931)

Our baseball games were usually played in the middle of Ellison Ave. Auto traffic was light and if a “car” did come along someone would call out to warn us. We reluctantly made a little room for it to pass by. There was also a dirt field just behind the Ellison/King Farm next to Fisher Ave. If it rained, it was not available. We could always play on the brick street. We chose up sides for the game by picking the two best baseball players(we didn’t want them both on the same team). Each designated captain than chose from the remainder of the boys, one at a time, back and forth, until all the players were on a team. It was quite embarrassing if you were the last name called out. We did this so often that we had the procedure down to a fine art. We appointed no Umpire. It was more fun just to argue any disputed calls. The final score was meaningless and we usually played until we were called in for dinner or supper. By that time we had a good appetite.

Shelby Park would have been a fine place to play ball but it was too far and we didn’t have any time to waste walking there. In the fall there was an organized football program. Very few of us joined in this sport. We used Shelby Park’s other facilities, such as the swimming pool, the swings and slides, sometimes the tennis courts and last but not least, the Public Library intermittently. We did visit the park at night to watch the separate boys and girls organized softball and hardball games under the lights. Softball, at that time, was all fast-pitch. Boy, those girls were good. Shelby Park was not a picnic oriented park. We mostly went there for the recreation facilities. Most of our family picnics took place at Cherokee Park. We also went to Shawnee Park and Iroquois Park. You could travel to either of these on an electric street car. To travel to Iroquois Park was a long trip. You “caught” an Oak Street car, transferred at fourth St. and settled back for the long trip out into the country. At the turn-around point next to the park was the Colonial Gardens Night-Club. Also, at this point was a private park and small zoo called Jacobs’ Park. It was owned by a former mayor of Louisville and was quite interesting for that time. It had an extensive picnic grounds.(Aunt Bernadine Steinmetz’s daughter, Rita S. Steinmetz died, March 31, 1931)

I now had my own bicycle. I don’t remember just where it came from. It probably had belonged to Frank. I had told you previously that there were three sizes of “bike”. A 24, 26 or 28 incher. Mine was a 24 incher and second hand. All the tires were tube-type of small diameter and a “must” was an inner tube repair kit. You couldn’t live without one. The larger diameter, tubeless, balloon tire, came out on the market later. I had been riding this bike for a some time, off and on. What has stuck in my mind was the difficulty learning how to keep my balance while learning to ride it. I thought I would never learn. After a short period of learning the bike became one with my body. I could do almost anything with it. It was like a young fellow learning to drive an automobile today. Once you get a little experience you feel that you and the car are as one.

Since hardly anyone, today, knows what an inner-tube is or why you need a repair kit to fix one, I need to explain this. Just imagine your tubeless tire of today without the especially designed rim structure on the wheel. A minor miracle. The design of the rim and the design of the tire to fit the rim makes the joint between the two, air tight. Without these two designs the tire could not hold air and an inner tube with an attached valve stem was needed. The valve stem was used to put air into the tube and was not attached to the rim as it is today. You would fit the tube into the tire, check that the tube was free all the way around with no pinches and then slip the tire onto the wheel rim with the valve stem sticking out through a hole in the rim. You did this with the help of a screw driver. Attach the end of the hose from your hand pump to the valve stem and after fifty or sixty up and down pumps you were ready to replace the wheel on the bicycle. Always have your air pressure gauge handy. While you were pumping you were constantly checking that the tire was fitting into the rim and that the valve stem was straight up.

Why did you have the tire off the wheel in the first place? You had run over a nail or tack and the tube would no longer hold air. After you took off the wheel, you were careful to mark where the hole in the tube was located for they were small and hard to find after you took the tube out of the tire. You could go to the trouble of putting air into the tube and holding the tube under water looking for bubbles but it was easier to use the toothpick approach if you could. After locating the hole you would usually stick a toothpick or nail back in the hole temporarily until you were ready to put on a patch. Tire patch kits were contained in a cardboard tube and were manufactured and sold by tire companies. The kit came with a metal cap which had a protruding grating or roughening surface. Inside were several different sizes of patches and a tube of adhesive(a rubber cement). Each patch came with adhesive already on one surface and it was protected with a plastic cover similar to the way address labels and postage stamps are made today. Now, to repair the hole in the inner tube. Lay the tube on a flat surface with the hole sticking up. Take the lid from the kit and rough up the rubber surface wherever the patch would stick. Open the cement tube and spread cement over this area evenly but not thick. Let the surface dry much like you would rubber cement when gluing two pieces of leather together. When you think the surface is ready, chose the correct size patch, strip off the plastic cover and press the patch down over the hole, cement to cement. Hold it in place with a small block of wood and your thumbs for about sixty seconds and, if you’re lucky you will soon be back riding your bike. You could have taken the flat tire over to Johnson’s Hardware store to be repaired but who could afford that solution. I might add at this point that this procedure of repairing a “leak” in a bicycle tube was exactly the same for an automobile inner tube except it was a lot more difficult to remove the tire from the old-fashioned rims and then replace it and you needed a heavier tool than a screwdriver, and, a rubber mallet was a big help. All the procedures were the same though.(1-21-2001)

I hope I don’t bore everyone by continuing on the same theme, rubber cement, but I think this is important. None of the young people or even the “baby boomers” like to hear anything about the “Great Depression.” But, it lasted for such a long time and affected so many lives that you must know more about it. Which brings me to this question. If two men were sitting side by side with their legs crossed facing you, how could you tell which had a steady job and which was just barely surviving? You looked at the soles of their shoes among other things. The man with the nice, slick, leather shoe soles had a good job. The other would show you clean shoes, but the soles would be covered with a rubber patch. It was easy to replace rubber heals but the soles were more difficult. As soon as you wore a hole in the soles of a shoe, you purchased a “patch.” The patch was just like the patch for an innertube but was made of tougher material and could be purchased in various sizes to fit your shoe size. In attaching the patch to the shoe sole you went through the same procedure as you did for repairing the innertube. No one felt demeaned by this and one thing was sure. You could walk in the rain and your socks would stay dry. Our family used this method many times during the(gasp!)depression. If I think of any more money saving ideas, I’ll tell you about them.(1-23-2001)

Before going into the next year of my history, I have to add this for it concerns my brother Robert as a baby. On Sunday, Jan. 21, 2001, my Grandson Tony Gnadinger and his wife, Chris, had a male baby which they will name, Nicholas. He was born prematurely and weighed two pounds, two ounces at birth but healthy and kicking. I sent this on by e-mail to a lot of people. My cousin, Helen(Steinmetz)Hammond sent this response, and I quote: “I do not know if you knew that your brother Robert was a small baby and I remember Aunt Kitty(Katherine Von Bossum) telling me that he was so small that they could put him in a cigar box, and look how he turned out.” Isn’t that an interesting addition to our memories? Also, brother Robert’s son, Richard was born prematurely.(Monk’s(Harold)wife, Viola Catherine[Meeks]Buchter, born, Aug. 11, 1931)