A Single Mother

It was the dog days of August 1988, and as it had been for two years now, every day must have seemed the same for Ellen. First she would get Stacy off to school. Then she would either drive her boys to her mother’s apartment on Chippewa Street before heading downtown to work, or pick up her mother so she could baby-sit in the apartment. With her children’s arrangements complete, Ellen went to her job.

Her routine commute went north along South Broadway, the principal north-south connector between the heart of downtown and the city’s residential and commercial neighborhoods, where Ellen had lived all her life. On the final leg of her drive to work, she would speed downtown on I-55, the Ozark Expressway, which nobody ever called anything but “Fifty-Five.” South Broadway is the old arterial feed to South St. Louis, once a lily-white enclave of blue-collar European immigrants. Its many neighborhoods were populated with German or Italian or Irish immigrants who had come here to find work in the breweries or in the city’s expanding shoe-manufacturing industry. The streets and houses of the South Side, alongside the Mississippi River, offer endless examples of turn-of-the-century residential architecture. Modesty of scale didn’t prevent breadth of detail when it came to building the front porch, or elaborating with a cornice, or creating a faux frieze in the plebeian red brick. Today, the neighborhoods of St. Louis’s South Side still exude middle-class pride, but whereas there used to be a certainty that one could find the good life here, now many of them are leaving for greener pastures.

At the beginning of this century, St. Louis was ranked fourth in size among America’s great cities. First there was New York, then Chicago and Philadelphia, and St. Louis, with 575,238 people. In the 1990 census, there were just under 400,000 residents of this city, ranking it as America’s twenty-seventh largest city.

At the turn of the century, almost one out of every four families owned their own home. Today, only four out of ten homes are owner-occupied, and in what is a sign of decline, nearly fifteen percent of St. Louis’s dwellings stand vacant. Of those, nearly one in four is boarded up, with no immediate plans for occupancy. Many of them are, by building-code standards, unfit for human habitation. Even more troubling is the growing poverty rate.

Almost four in every ten families in the city are living below poverty level. For single mothers with children under five years of age, sixty-five percent are living in poverty.

Ellen, the daughter of middle-class St. Louisians, was a child of the postwar prosperity and also a witness to the change. She was seven years old when the triumphal Busch Arch was completed. But only five years later, by the time she was twelve, St. Louis passed another milestone among American cities: It had lost more of its people to the suburbs in the decade between 1962 and 1972 than any other American city. While few cities in America were immune to white flight, St. Louis’s problem was aggravated by an accompanying exodus among middle-class blacks to the cleaner, safer, and greener haven of outlying St. Louis County.

Today, downtown St. Louis is deserted after business hours. Along Market Street, Ellen would pass one after another building erected with equal proportions of magnitude—all of them on a grand scale—for the public administration of this place. The massive neoclassical edifices no longer symbolize grandeur and prosperity. Somehow, the better days were now long gone. This was no longer the gateway to the West. It was the place everyone wanted to leave.

Ellen worked at a modern, gray office building at 1010 Market. There she spent her day, keying hundreds of entries into a word processor for Andersen Consulting, a unit of Arthur Andersen & Co., the giant accounting firm. In 1988, she had been at Andersen for two years. She earned almost $20,000 a year, and appeared to be making a go of it as a divorced single parent.

To her coworkers, Ellen was a cheerful, gregarious, and hardworking employee. They actually knew next to nothing about the real Ellen Kay Booker Boehm—who had recently filed for bankruptcy protection, who had recently lost her home. They didn’t know that her husband had left her when she was eight months pregnant with her third child.

In her twenty-eight years, Ellen had seen much of what life can throw at people. She had been born and had lived every day of her life right here, in a ten-square-mile patch of South St. Louis. This was where she grew up, experienced the rite of passage of her first job out of high school. Here was where she met her husband. Had her children. Bought her first house. And this was where she was finally abandoned to fend for herself.

In August of that year she finally had to give up the house, a two-story, redbrick flat on tree-lined Wyoming Street in the heart of South St. Louis. The house looked out on the athletic grounds behind Roosevelt High School, her alma mater. It killed her to leave, but there was no alternative. After Paul had left, she first tried to make ends meet by renting out the upstairs, but that didn’t work out.

Ellen was supposed to get $105 a week in child support, but she couldn’t even locate her husband. When the mortgage and credit-card payments overtook her, she just walked away. The Veterans’ Administration, which held a mortgage for $30,000, took the house back.

This was a severe blow for someone who had always been very good with money. Fresh out of high school, on a modest salary as a secretary, Ellen had managed to save almost enough to make a down payment on a new car. It was a forest-green Dodge Aspen sedan right off the showroom floor at King Dodge.

Paul went with her to buy the car. Being a Chrysler man, he wanted to make sure she got a “slant six,” a six-cylinder engine with a longevity that had become a legend. The car had power steering and a few other nonstandard features, but it wasn’t loaded, as the lingo went, by any means. There was no air conditioning, for example, a definite shortcoming during the peak of summer in St. Louis, where the heat could be suffocating. But Ellen was in love with the car just the same. She had saved $500 for a down payment, and when she learned that it wasn’t quite enough, Paul helped out. He made up what was needed with a $100 charge on his MasterCard, and Ellen was able to drive her new car out of the showroom.

The year was 1979. By all measures, the future looked bright. She had a job. She had a brand-new car. She was only nineteen years old, and out of high school barely a year. What’s more, she already knew the man she would marry. They had met when she was a senior at Roosevelt High, and Paul Boehm was a bus driver.

In fact, Paul was so enamored, he wanted to marry his young, blond passenger the day she graduated from high school. Ellen wanted to wait, not ready to take the plunge. She wanted to get out on her own for a while.

Not until June 7, 1980, after she had experienced the freedom as a young adult for almost two years after her high school graduation did Ellen make good on her promise to Paul. It was three days before her twentieth birthday. Her groom was practically old enough to be her father, and this wasn’t going to be his first marriage, nor would it be his last.

The newlyweds had considerable baggage that was destined to get in the way of their dream of a happy, normal life together. In Ellen’s case were the scars of childhood abuse, which were compounded by a life spent with an older, alcoholic father, who wasn’t even around during most of Ellen’s last year in high school, and who was dead by the time she married.

John Booker, at five-feet-ten inches, wasn’t tall, big-boned, or remarkably handsome. But women were taken by his pretty blue eyes, which in concert with his powerful thirst for whiskey and beer were his undoing. He could have been a wealthy man, but it was all blown away on women and drinking. This pattern was in full swing when he arrived in St. Louis in the middle fifties, looking for a job at McDonnell Douglas, the big aircraft company. He had traveled north from the little town of Ripley, Mississippi, where he had been born and raised on a cotton farm. But he wasn’t a young Southern boy in search of a new destiny beyond the bayou. No, John Booker was already in his early forties, and he left behind a devout wife and seven children.

When he left Mary Gladys Booker, and their five sons and two daughters, he broke her heart. He wouldn’t tell a soul why he left. His children knew that he drank, that there were always other women on the periphery, but they also believed that their father truly loved Mary. It didn’t do her much good, though, because the divorce nearly killed her. She still loved the impossible John Booker. Though only forty-one, she never remarried or even dated.

But John did remarry, almost overnight, and within a year of his departure from Ripley, his new bride, Catherine, was expecting. After Catherine had a miscarriage, she quickly became pregnant again, and when a little girl was born, they named her Ellen Kay. For Catherine, it was to be her only child. For John, Baby Ellen was just that, his youngest. Back in Ripley, his next oldest child was a pretty toddler named Rita, who had absolutely no memory of her father.

Rita would wait until she was four years old to ever meet him. She remembers a man coming into the house, picking her up and swinging her around. Then he kissed her, put her back down, and left the room, going back outside with her brothers.

“Who was that?” little Rita asked her mother.

“That was your daddy.”

Some of John Booker’s discontent stemmed from family tragedy. When he was thirteen years old, he had lost his father in a horrible car-and-train accident. The last memory he had of his father was seeing him on fire, burning to death in the wreckage. John was in the accident, too, and so was his father’s sister, who also died, along with another couple and their baby. The ensuing teenage years were hard ones, and John Booker didn’t finish high school. Soon a working man, he became a drinker with a short temper that got him into frequent brawls.

Still, he and his mother lived on a large farm, making him fairly well off. Besides the main house, set on a large parcel planted in cotton, there were other pieces of land, some with houses. One by one, John sold them off, squandering the proceeds. Finally, when his mother changed the will, the final eighty-two acres with the main house was protected from his philandering. It couldn’t be sold until after her son’s death.

When he left his native Mississippi behind, he never severed his emotional links there. In 1977, when Mary Gladys suddenly died of a massive heart attack at the age of sixty-one, her errant ex-husband made a prodigal trip to her funeral. He was quite sick himself, suffering from pneumonia, but he boarded an all-night bus in St. Louis. He was overcome at her funeral. His children would never forget how hard he cried over her death.

While Ellen and her mother were understanding about his need to attend the funeral of the mother of his seven other children, it was an entirely different matter when he abandoned St. Louis a few months later. This time he moved back to Ripley, living on the Booker estate with his sons.

At the time Ellen was a junior at Roosevelt High. Her father was sixty-four-years old and in suffering health. As it would turn out, he would never really come back to live with Catherine. After almost a year passed, he returned to St. Louis and was placed in a nursing home. In June of 1979, only a matter of months later, he died of cancer.

Ellen inherited her one-eighth share of the farm, which a stepbrother later bought, but John Booker’s legacy for her was mostly pain and betrayal. Before becoming an absentee father, he has been characterized as rigid and emotionally unavailable. Often he was drunk and abusive. Like many children of alcoholics, Ellen would marry the first man who paid real attention to her, and he would turn out—in the most fateful way—to be in some ways just like her father.