Excerpts from Robert S. Smith's Idaho Surgeon

To go back to East St. Louis as I remember it in my boyhood, I think its population then was about 60,000. Its economy was based on its big stockyards, its packing houses (Swift's, Armour's and the Morris Co.), its aluminum ore plant, its iron works, and its railroad facilities (B. & O., Louisville & Nashville, Illinois Central, and Burlington). East St. Louis was a big railroad center and terminal at that time.

Many people worked in St. Louis department stores, offices, and manufacturing plants, and went to St. Louis by street car each day. Street cars went all over East St. Louis and St. Louis, and crossed the Mississippi River on the Eads Bridge.

East St. Louis was made up mainly of working class people; and my father had come there to practice after getting his M. D. degree at the Marion-Sims Medical College (later the St. Louis University School of Medicine) and interning at St. Louis City Hospital, because he was sure that he would be busy right off, and able to make a living. He and my mother lived on St. Clair Avenue, as this street approached the stock yards packing house district. They lived in a "flat" on the second floor above a dry goods store. Railroad tracks ran alongside the store, and crossed St. Clair Avenue. My father had his first office in the front part of the apartment in which he and my mother lived. This location was in an unattractive part of town, to say the least.

My father was very busy from the first day of his private practice. He treated people in his office - many drunks, knife wounds, etc., particularly on Saturday nights -and he made house calls by horse and buggy. My brother John was born in the flat in 1903 with my father in attendance, and I was born there also. Richard, Carl, and Harvey were born in a better part of town. My birth is documented in a letter, dated Sept. 19, 1906, that my Grandfather Clanahan wrote to his son Bob, then a student at the University of Illinois. I received this letter in 1972 from my cousin Barkley Clanahan.

My father moved his family from the rough part of town in which he had his first office (I think it was known as "Whiskey Chute", or at least it was near a section called "Whiskey Chute") to the Lansdowne Park neighborhood on the east side of the city shortly after I was born. Lansdowne was a pleasant place when I was a boy.

There were originally a number of big trees, a variety of poplar, along both sides of Lincoln Avenue, and large locust trees grew in vacant lots between 23rd and 25th streets.

A special kind of weed also grew all over the vacant lots each summer. This weed sometimes grew to a height of seven feet and had a stout center stalk. We boys used to clear out central areas in the weed jungles. There we would sit around and talk, and, on occasion, smoke cigarettes made of corn silk (the dry, dark brown tassels of ripe ears of corn) rolled up in pieces of newspaper. Green corn, "roastin' ears", was a summer staple in that part of Illinois, just like watermelons, cantaloupes, green beans, and tomatoes. Corn silk cigarettes were not very good, but harmless; and smoking them made us feel like men of the world. In the fall, stalks of the weeds dried out and the leaves fell off. Then the weed stalks came readily out of the ground and made most marvelous arrows and spears for mock battles by the neighborhood boys. Since the root of the weed was large, hard, and heavier than the rest of the weed, the weed stalk would be thrown through the air, weighted by the root when thrown root first, with a wonderful high trajectory. In neighborhood mock battles, the Smith boys and their friends would charge and counter-charge the "25th Street gang", who all lived just a few blocks away. Sometimes rocks were thrown and sling shots were used. Even an occasional B-B gun appeared on the scene. I don't think, however, that anyone was ever injured in the fray.

I should speak of the topography of the Mississippi bottom land where East St. Louis is situated since one feature of it had a very important influence on the activities of my boyhood. On the east side of the great river a very flat plain extends back about 15 or 20 miles to bluff's and higher country. On the St. Louis side there is little flat land, that city being built on hills and generally high ground. In my boyhood the country to the east of the river always must have had a very high water table and the whole area was susceptible to flooding in the spring when the flow of water down the Mississippi was great. About four blocks to the east of our house there was a long winding lake called the Lansdowne Lagoon. It was quite a body of water that was crossed by bridges, and broken up by a number of east-west streets. It was related at its north end to a swampy area but curved around in a southerly direction to a deep, well confined collection of water. In time, the northern portion of the lagoon was drained and filled in; while the southern end was developed as a part of Jones Park.

In the time of my earliest recollection, there was a big "amusement" center, called Lansdowne Park, in a big open space southeast of our house, near the lake and readily accessible to us boys. With the passage of time, the park became very run down and seedy,, and its facilities were finally dismantled entirely. In its palmy days, it had a roller coaster, a shooting gallery, bowling alleys, a soda fountain, a large dance floor, and pavilionrestaurant overlooking the lagoon, and a swimming area marked off into the water. With the passage of time, all of the park building were torn down except the one containing the dance floor. The dance floor was large and wonderfully smooth, and there, as a teen-ager, I did my first dancing. I particularly remember the picnics of the Knights of Columbus (we then had many Catholics in East St. Louis - mostly Irish and Slavs) when I used to dance for hours with various girls. Some of my partners were older than I, and no particular love objects; but they were good dancers. Dancing at Lansdowne Park was one of the things we did in the summer time during my high school years.

Until I was about 11 years old, the lagoon - particularly the northern, wilder part - was a great place for fishing. Many people used to come there, from as far away as St. Louis, to fish for catfish, crappie, "blue gills", and "sun fish". I learned to swim, dog fashion, in the lagoon at the age of 6. One memory that I have - it seems fantastic in retrospect - is about a tree that used to hang over the lagoon so that its branches in great part were under the surface of the water. A large number of snakes, water moccasins, used to come up out of the water and sun themselves on the upper branches of this tree. We boys thought it sport (?) to stand on the bank and shoot these snakes with our air rifles. When we hit a snake he would fall off the tree into the lagoon, probably to die. Although the snakes were known to be venomous, and undoubtedly lived in the lagoon in great numbers, I never gave them a second thought when I went swimming in the lake or went there fishing.

The summer the lagoon was drained was one of the most unusual of my childhood. I must have been at that time 11 years old, and I was big and strong enough to handle myself pretty well. I do not know now how the water was drained away (probably by some system of drainage pipes at the southern end of the lake complex) but the parts of the lagoon close to our house, and particularly near the site of the old amusement park, lost depth in a few days so that finally only 1-1/2 to 2 feet of water covered a gooey mud bottom.

The boys of the neighborhood soon found a way to catch the many fish that had been driven together by the contraction of the water mass in the lagoon. The fishcatching technique we developed, and practiced for many days, was called "tubbing". We would knock the bottom out of an old wash tub, a standard household item in those days; and, getting out into the lake in our bare feet, we would throw the tub with a twirling force as far ahead as we could. Then we would wade up to the tub sitting down on the lake bottom, and with our hands catch all the fish unfortunate enough to be caught in the open ended tub when it settled down in the water. By far the commonest fish caught were catfish, although at first we caught many fish of the perch family, and a surprising number of large bass that we had never dreamed had a home in the lagoon. Chasing the fish around in the muddy water in the tub was exciting and rewarding. The only bad thing about it was that we occasionally had our hands slashed by the big fins near the head of the catfish. When one of these fins cut or punctured your hand, the wound was so painful you thought you had been poisoned. Actually I think the pain was due only to the contact of the muddy water with the open laceration incurred.* Strangely enough none of the many wounds we suffered in our "tubbing" project ever got infected. We largely tended to ignore our injuries, which was easy in the excitement of the chase.

One charm of the "tubbing" was the fact that, when you came up to your tub sitting down in the lake, you never knew what you would find when you put your hands into the water confined within it. For example, one cast of the tub caught a bass weighing easily 3 1/2 pounds. We proudly carried him home alive, and put him in our bathtub (the only one in the house) where he lived reasonably well for several days, until he was sacrificed and eaten.

Our parents were very tolerant. One day, we boys caught a whole school of baby catfish, probably with a net, and installed them in the bathtub. They were doing pretty well there until one day my father decided to take a bath, and knowingly or unknowingly flushed them down the drain.

(*This impression of mine now appears to have been incorrect. On March 17,1974, the "Outdoors" section of the Arizona Republic (Phoenix) featured a report that recent research has shown that catfish do have poison glands associated anatomically with their characteristic dagger-like pectoral fins. It was stated in this newspaper article that poison exuded from these glands is responsible for the intense pain an angler experiences when a catfish fin punctures the skin of his hand.)

Jones Park was well developed over a good sized area. In one part, an athletic field, with a stadium, was, the scene of the high school football games when I as a high school freshman and sophomore. There were tennis courts in the park nearby, and here we played tennis with our friends off and on all summer. There was a cinder track at the field, and on it I had my first not too successful experiences in competitive running. In a Boy Scout troop meet, or an inter-church meet, I remember that I was unpleasantly surprised when I was rather easily beaten in a quarter mile run by Edward Cannady (later my good friend and companion in medical school). Ed had been doing some running with members of the high school varsity track squad. As I remember, I just went out and ran.

I certainly was not much of an athlete in grade school, where the game was soft ball. I was young for my class (having skipped two full terms of school, one term in the 2nd grade and one term in the 4th), physically immature, and inept. Lack of physical maturity handicapped me in high school for varsity athletics, but I was always active in pick-up neighborhood games, and better organized Y.M.C.A. sports. When I acquired James Clarence "Dizzy" Leigh as a friend in my second year of high school, I was assured of constant athletic activity. Diz was a natural athlete and although never on the high school varsity basketball team was tremendous in class games and in contests of Y.M.C.A. and church leagues. (In 1963, at the 40th reunion of our high school class, I had an opportunity to observe Dizzy's undiminished physical abilities; I saw him hit a golf ball between 200 and 300 yards with each stroke off the tee at a Belleville, Ill. driving range.

I could easily write several chapters about "Dizzy" Leigh - or "old Diz" as he sometimes referred to himself. I had had other moderately close friends before he came into my life; but Dizzy immediately became my one pal when he moved to our neighborhood. He was very important to me in my high school years. Our friendship never varied; we had no arguments, no unpleasantness at any time. Diz joined the small Presbyterian Church Sunday School class I belonged to, along with Ed Cannady and several other teenagers, and soon was the star of our basketball quintet.

The Presbyterians had some great games with the Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, and other Protestant aggregations. The teams developed in East St. Louis in a parochial league, which included St. Patrick's, St. Joseph's, Sacred Heart, and other Catholic churches, were much too strong for us; and I still remember one completely disastrous game with a St. Patrick's team. Each year the Y.M.C.A. had a basketball league, and Dizzy and I always played on the same team, Saturday after Saturday, all winter.

As normal teenagers, Dizzy and I were intensely interested in girls. We went to all the dances, and had many dates, most of them, at the start, of the double-date variety. We thought that we were expert neckers, and aspired to be petters (petting was anything below the neck). Dizzy and I talked about the girls constantly; and I remember Dizzy demonstrating his sure fire "hold." Diz had great, strong, loose-jointed arms; and, when he would wrap them around a female, particularly if she were small or slender, the effect was as if she had been put in a straitjacket. There was no alternative for Dizzy's date but to submit to a thorough smooching. I was always sure that Dizzy out-classed me as much in lovemaking as he did in all other sports. Actually at this time we were innocent and idealistic, and would not stoop to making any practical arrangements for a ravishment. I, at least, was terrified by the idea of getting a girl pregnant or contracting a venereal disease.

Dizzy and I lived in the Rudolph Valentino era, when the boys wore bell-bottomed corduroy trousers and grew long sideburns. Even in the "Valentino" department Dizzy had me beat because he had heavy darkbrown hair, and brown eyes, and his hair could be parted in. the middle and slicked down to present the perfect image of the Latin lover. Diz and I, and the girls we went out with, could double-date together very well. We would frequently change off throughout an evening with the necking and the driving of my father's Model T Ford Sedan, or Dizzy's folks' car. When one couple was up front driving, the other couple would be in the back seat smooching, dividing the time of the date with regard to these activities more or less equally. This was truly quite pleasant, associated with no emotional hangovers, ,and regarded all participants as just a pastime.

Dizzy's folks were from Kentucky, and he was their only child. The Leighs lived in a bungalow about four blocks from 2311 Lincoln Avenue; and, in the daily routine, either Dizzy was over at my house or I was over at his. Dizzy's folks had a player piano that we could pump while drinking bottles of his father's non-alcoholic drinks.

Dizzy was influential in my getting my first regular laboring job. In the summer of 1922, between our junior and senior years at high school, Diz got a job at the Certain-Teed Roofing Company, in the East St. Louis industrial district, to the south of the business section and over toward the river. The company establishment was clear across town, and to get there you had to travel by street car or auto. Diz was a year older than I, bigger and stronger. I got a general labor job, however, when I followed his example and applied for work at the plant. I was paid 19 cents an hour and, since the workers were unprotected by union membership or any industry regulation whatsoever, the work day was as long as the bosses, or the work to be done, required.

I went to work before 8:00 a.m. - after a while my father let me drive one of his Model T Fords across town to the plant -and I would work a shift of at least 10 hours, many times longer. The work was mainly on a loading dock, where I carried boxes and barrels of various kinds; but at times I had to do a job much worse. This was to stand in front of a machine pushing out large finished asphalt shingles and handle its output, in a very dusty, potentially lung-damaging atmosphere. The people working with me were, in general, unskilled and very poor (they had to be to need a job paying only 19 cents per hour); and many were black. I stuck out the job most of the summer; and it did have some educational value, in giving me an insight into the trials and problems of the uneducated laboring man. Incidentally, a school classmate's father (Alonzo Farnham) was the manager, the head man, of the whole plant; and my schoolmate had a summer job in the company office. From the plant dock, I used to see father and son come to work in the morning in a big Cadillac (or its 1922 equivalent). I really did not resent this disparity in our occupations, since I was doing a job that I had asked for.

In our junior and senior years in high school, Dizzy and I were taken into a kind of social fraternity called The Triple Four". This was the elite social group in high school. Most of the boys in the club lived in the best part of town as it was in that time, a central residential district not too far from the high school. The activities of "The Triple Four" consisted mainly of eating big fancy dinners in turn at each other's homes (truly a little hard on the boys' mothers) and giving dances at the Elks' Lodge building, where there were two dance floors, one a formal ball room and the other, quite modest, in the basement of the building (the Rathskeller). The club subjected new members to a rather severe mock initiation, but Diz and I lived through ours all right.

The truth is that the part of the city in which Diz and I lived, the neighborhood near the Jefferson School, could only be rated in the middle as far as society went in those days. I have said that the town was a working man's town. In general this is true; but there were some quite nice residential areas in the center of the city, on Signal Hill (between the city proper and Belleville some twelve miles to the east), and in a fairly extensive area just to the east of the old Lansdowne lagoon. The St. Clair Country Club was in the Signal Hill area, and I believe that some people even played golf there in the days of my youth.

When I graduated from high school in 1923, the high school alumni association gave a "dinner-dance" at the St. Clair Country Club. Since I was president of the graduating class, I had to attend, and I took Leila Thomas, my steady girl friend at that time, to it. The dinner cost $1.50 per person; and the main course was a half spring chicken. I had only previously encountered chicken, cut up and fried, in pieces appropriate to hold in one hand or two. I'm afraid I had quite a tussle with the main course using a knife and fork - and no hands - to the embarrassment of the loved one who had accompanied me to the affair!

Our Sunday School class decided to buy a canoe and keep it available for the use of the class members at Jones Park. We each contributed a small surn and were able to buy a nice canoe; and we maintained it for several years at the boat house on the Park lake. We may have taken some girls out in it from time to time, but I don't remember any "big" dates in it. Dizzy named it, and its name was painted on its prow. Since Dizzy was taking Spanish in high school at the time we bought the canoe, its name was "La Mas Buena Clase."

To back up a little: When my father built the Lincoln Avenue house, probably in 1908, he must have planned a big family. He had three children when the family moved into the new house, and at two year intervals he acquired two more. The house was peculiar to the time in a number of respects. It had a large attic and a large basement. It also had a barn; not a garage, but a barn for a horse, because my father at that time made house calls and moved about town with a horse and buggy. The barn had a hay loft and a chute for pitching hay down to the horse's manger. There was a chicken house attached to the barn where we first had chickens, later ducks; and the chicken house finally became a carport for a second car, a Model-T for many years.

The house was heated by a coal furnace, nothing automatic about it, and steam radiators. In the basement there was a laundry stove, a coal bin (the coal came in big lumps), and a work bench where my father had a massive stationary vise and many tools. Since the family laundry was frequently quite large, clothes lines for use in winter or in rainy weather were strung all over the basement. Old trunks, papers, records, pictures, toys and furniture usually found storage space in the attic. My brother Richard, as a young child, almost suffocated when the door of an old ice box in the attic snapped shut with him inside it.

The attic was repulsive to me. It was always dusty and dirty, and horribly hot in the summer. The basement was more attractive. When my father bought a big sack of hickory nuts in the fall, these could be cracked with the vise at his work bench and eaten hour after hour. Once in a while, when I was working as a delivery boy at Rice's Drug Store, across the street from our house, I would carry a pack of "Fatima" cigarettes, snitched from the drug store, to a far comer of the basement and have a few puffs from one of them (I could never stand to puff In more than one or two cigarettes out of a pack; I'd always throw away the rest because they invariably turned out to be not nearly as much fun as I had expected). Most cigarettes of that day were made of Turkish tobacco, and had such brand names as "Murad" and "Fatima"; and they were undoubtedly much stronger than the cigarettes commonly smoked in the United States today.

My father's house had a big front porch, with swing, and a back porch. There was only one bath room upstairs, and five bedrooms, one rather small. For a long time, Harvey (the baby), slept with my mother; Carl (next youngest) slept with my father; John (oldest) slept by himself; Richard and I (No. 3 and No. 2) slept together. My mother usually had the services of a hired girl; and she had one of the bedrooms to herself. Downstairs there was a big "front room" that had an oriental carpet on the floor with circular figures woven into it making it just right for marble games. This carpet was practically worn out one winter when we kept a pool table set up there, and played pool with our friends every day.

An important place in my father's house was a large centrally located "hall closet". This closet, on the first, floor, next to the dining room and not too far from the kitchen, was a repository for many things that did not seem to find a proper place in any other part of the house It provided storage space for all of the sports gear of a house full of males. In the closet could be found base balls, basketballs, tennis balls, baseball bats and mitts tennis rackets, boxing gloves, air rifles, and my father's shot guns and ammunition (also a German bolt-action rifle and helmet from World War I), my father's hunting clothes, boys' coats and sweaters of all sizes, ice - and roller - skates, parlor games, old books and papers, etc, etc. In the month of December each year, my mother "hid" Christmas presents and quantities of delicious home-made candy in the hall closet in anticipation of a happy holiday season. We boys always carried out an early investigation of my mother's stored goodies, and our surreptitious inroads on her confections were frequently so severe that she had to make a second run at candy making in the last week before Christmas.

Through careful detective work in the hall closet, I usually knew well ahead of time what everyone was going to get for Christmas. When I was in the third grade, my class was exposed to some school books that presented a fictionalized version of the development of primitive man; and I had been thrilled to read The Tree Dwellers and The Early Cave Men. I begged my mother to get me the book I knew came next in the series, The Later Cave Men, for Christmas. She made no promises but I soon discovered this coveted volume in a cupboard in the hall closet. Working away at it at odd times when my mother was not at home, I had read the Later Cave Men from cover to cover by the time Christmas Day dawned that year.