LETTERS FROM DOGTOWN

May 1944 - November 1945

Compiled by Margaret (Gierer) Buccat and Patricia (Gierer) Mills

No pages numbers
St. Louis: Hardbound, Inc., 2003
Privately printed, no ISBN #

Comments by Bob Corbett
January 2004

In May of 1944 Alice Scherzinger Vance, oldest daughter of author Helen Scherzinger, moved to the Washington, D.C. area to work in the war effort. This book is a long series of letters Helen wrote to her daughter in Washington.

Most of the letters are dominantly family news. Who was doing what around the house and at work, and news of Alice’s two brothers who were in the war, as well as their close neighbor Jim O’Shaughnessy who was also overseas.

What made this intimate family news especially interesting to me were several factors:

• The insight into this very typical family of Dogtown during these war years.
• The details of everyday activities such as nearly daily visits to church, visiting the local tavern with friends for an evening of socializing, the careful concerns for money in this working class area, and the incredibly close knit nature of not only the Scherzinger family, but of the neighborhood members themselves.

The picture of these details is not the dominant portion of the letters, family news is the greatest part by far. Nonetheless, for readers interested in the history of Dogtown and wanting a very nitty gritty picture of life in a quite typical household, this is a rich book, one I would highly recommend.

It’s not just a book to read through – which could be done rather quickly. But one needs to dig a bit for the gems which reveal this neighborhood picture I describe above. It is a book to read slowly, lingered over, imagining the implications and nature of this quiet life in these war years. Mrs. Scherzinger’s concerns, for example, of the ordeal to go “into town” (downtown St. Louis) is so revealing since the Dogtown neighborhood is just 8 miles from the heart of downtown and in the 1940s, unlike today, served by quite efficient public transportation. Dogtown comes out sounding like a remote place, far removed from the larger city of St. Louis.

Along the way of reading these letters I made some notes of things that called themselves especially to my attention. They include:

• The way the concern for the men away at war dominated life. The Scherzingers had two sons and a close neighbor in the war, and many other well-known neighborhood boys. Mrs. Scherzinger is always deeply concerned, writing often to her sons, praying for them all the time, their well-being never out of sight.
  
  
• The constant struggle within the Scherzinger household to get adequate cigarettes to survive.
  
  This constant preoccupation was just hilarious after a while. Alice had better connections to get cigarettes in Washington and frequently mailed them home. But even then there weren’t enough. One had the impression of the Scherzingers, down to their young children and even the dog, as being lit up all day long of every day!
  
  
• There were other problems with war-time shortages and ration tickets. Two items which were often mentioned by Helen Scherzinger were the problems with shoes and the distinction between shoes purchased with ration tickets (decent shoes) and non-regulated shoes, which were available, but which tended to fall apart in a few days. She describes them as having paper soles.
  
  The Scherzingers shopped a good deal at Garavaglia’s Grocery (now Garavaglia’s Deli) at the corner of Tamm and Wade. Now and again they had ham or other meat there, but it was not easy for the Scherzingers to get enough meat.
  
  
• Their Roman Catholic religion was also center to the Scherzinger family and they went not only to mass nearly every day, but to say the rosary at church on many night. Helen never so much speaks of going to mass, though she did daily, but she spoke of it as “going to receive Holy Communion.” That was a way of phrasing it I wasn’t familiar with.
  
  
• I had forgotten just how much work it took to maintain laundry in days before automatic washers and dryers became so prominent, and before permanent press clothes were wide- spread. It seemed like Helen and her neighbors were constantly washing and ironing.
  
  
• That brought up another issue – the frequent use of outside help in the home. Helen talks several times of how her daughter who lived up the street earned extra money by ironing for Mary Essma, another neighbor. Mary had given her the option of $3.00 a day or 40 cents and hour, and since she had young children at home and only wanted to work a limited time, she was very happy to iron for Mary for the 40 cents an hour.
  
  
• That leads me to another major issue that dominates the letters: The frequency – DAILY – visiting back and forth among the neighbors. They were forever coming to Scherzingers for tea or coffee, or the Scherzingers to other neighborhood on the block and other areas.
  
  Then, too, as I mentioned above, it was very common for whole families to gather with neighbors at the White House, my Uncle Randall Dwyer’s tavern at Graham and Clayton, where the electrical sub-station is now.
  
  It was also common for Helen to go up to the White House just to get away and visit with others in the later evenings when the children were in bed, even though in much of the time Helen didn’t drink anything. Other times she’d have a beer or two.
  
  
• It was interesting to see the reaction inside the Scherzinger family to the coming of The Dogtown News (there were only 6 editions and all of them are on my web page.)
  
  Alice sent in her support money to Mary Dwyer, Randall’s wife, who ran the paper, but since Mitch Scherzinger was one of the founding supporters of the paper, Mary returned Alice’s dollar. There is much discussion of the coming of each new edition and then discussion of how many of the service men were writing, very thrilled to be getting these newspapers from home. I was sorry then that they hadn’t started the paper as early as 1942!

I haven’t yet made contact with either of the two editors of this book and thus have no information on how anyone might purchase a copy of the book, or if that will even be possible.. Many, many Dogtown families are mentioned in the letters, and even if no one in one’s own family were in the letters, this glimpse inside a home in Dogtown in those two last war years is a fascinating document. I was only 6 when the war ended, but even at that age I did experience things and this book kept stimulating memories and fleshing out tales I had heard. I was in a place of special luck, however, since the Corbett family, both that of my Grandmother’s family on Wade, and our own family of my parents and me on Childress, come up in the book well over a dozen or more times, some fairly lengthy treatments, even my own being rushed to the hospital in 1945 when it was thought I might have polio.

I am most hopeful that it may turn out that copies of this book can be gotten by others. It is a treasure of Dogtown memories.

The task of compiling these letters, a great Scherzinger family treasure, was well-done by her two grand daughters, Margaret (Gierer) Buccat and Patricia (Gierer) Mills. Their decision to not correct spelling and grammar was a wise one, again lending insight into the people, their ways and habits.

Reading these letters, learning so much, have many things re-called to my memory at attention was a great joy. I can’t help wondering how many more sets of letters exist somewhere in the family holdings of other Dogtown families, perhaps not as extensive as Helen Scherzinger’s set, but significant nonetheless. If only I knew how to locate such great treasures. Editing them and presenting them to the public could be a great service offered by the Dogtown Historical Society. But how in the world do such treasures get identified and found?

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