OCTOBER 2017
In St. Charles, Missouri, I checked into a hotel in the river town’s historic district. The building was all brick, like so many of the nineteenth-century structures lining the street, and they’d tried to make the new construction look more august by chiseling the concrete foundation to mimic granite, but its sterile, utilitarian lobby and a plastic display case of chocolate chip cookies on the reception counter belied attempts at time travel. After the receptionist gave me my room card, I asked what St. Charles was most famous for, and he promptly said Lewis and Clark, as if I’d pressed a button and there was my answer.
“They started here,” he told me proudly.
I nodded, knowing from childhood they’d launched from St. Louis and figuring St. Charles could probably lay claim to some of the credit.
Then he tilted his head to the side and shook it slightly. “But I’m not sure where they ended up.”
I looked to see if there was a joke coming, but he seemed genuinely puzzled, so I offered up a guess, as if I wasn’t sure, either. “Oregon?”
“Oregon, that’s right,” he said.
For as long as I’d been talking to Jim Feltz, we talked infrequently of anything but the likes of Salerno, Sicily, Casablanca, Anzio, Brooklyn, and Overland back in the day, so much so that I had a hard time inserting him into the present. On the way in from the airport, I’d driven for St. Charles on I-70, past one big box store after another, and then past a Trane factory and a Hewlett-Packard plant. It wasn’t all about commerce, for there among the titans of retail sales and manufacturing was faithchurchstlouis.com, a massive warehouse of a store that might have once been a supersize Walmart but was trading in souls now, or trying to, and recruiting new members with its URL in big bold lettering strung along a facade that fronted the highway. High on a bluff over the Missouri was an Ameristar, whatever that was, sounding more like a third-rate television brand than what it looked like and actually was, a casino. I-70 heaved up beyond the big boxes to crest the Missouri, and there was the casino, laid out along the river with a lot of faux, old-style lighting and ample room for cars. In this thoroughly modern mix of commerce and industrial-weight soul-saving, it was hard to imagine there was room enough for men like Jim Feltz, who’d come of age at a time when they rigged Victrolas in their cars for music and when the dollar store was an essential part of the shopping experience, not symptomatic of what was desperate and tawdry about America.
Waiting for Jim in the lobby, on the verge of meeting him face-to-face for the first time, I tried mapping from the one image I had of him from 1942, in that Casablanca picture, to what he might look like today, aging him like one of those time-lapse exercises online. He pulled up to the front of my hotel in a late-model Ford Escape SUV and stepped down out of the car to say hello. His hair was sparse but comb-able, and his mouth had sunk some with age, and yanked slightly to the side, that “crooked Feltz grin,” as his sister put it in a letter she’d written to him in 1942. He weighed probably what he weighed in the Navy. In fact, no matter how much older men resemble no one so much as one another, Jim clearly looked like an older version of the seventeen-year-old sailor who’d stood in that studio in Casablanca with my great-uncle in November of 1942.
That night at dinner in Lewis & Clark’s on South Main Street, he told me he hadn’t talked much about the war after the war. He’d started a truck parts business that did well all the way through the fifties, sixties, seventies, and into the eighties. He hadn’t been hiding anything; he just wasn’t talking about it, and he recalled how even his closest customers, when they found out he’d served on a destroyer during the war, were surprised that such a vital experience wasn’t part of what they knew about Jim. His reticence thawed all of a sudden in 1982 when he decided to go to one of the ship’s first reunions. He never missed another, and as late as 2017 he was hoping for one last hurrah at a Tin Can Sailors reunion in Buffalo.
In the same way Jim hadn’t maintained his ties to Plunkett for so long, he likewise hadn’t dwelled much on one other setting he talked about a lot: the dollar store. Because I wanted to see the store, he’d traveled to his hometown the day before my arrival for some reconnaissance. He’d parked and set out on the Woodson Road, looking up and down at the old brick buildings, but he couldn’t quite recall which had been Siegal’s. He’d gone into stores and asked questions, hoping to locate the old five-and-dime. One man took him outside and showed him a newer building in between two older buildings, and then Jim got his bearings and figured he’d located Siegal’s. Still he wasn’t sure.
In the morning, after a breakfast of buttermilk pancakes and bacon, we drove to Overland and parked on Woodson, just up from the big intersection at Midway that had once been run through with streetcars and was now dominated by a QuikTrip convenience store fronted by banks of gas pumps. On either side of Woodson, the storefronts of Overland’s hub were shaded by primary-colored canopies and signage so small we couldn’t tell what sort of businesses had set up in town except for the Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy. It was as if the discreet signage was in cahoots with the nonessential nature of the business within. On the ground floor of the most architecturally compelling building on Woodson was the Game Haven. Still, there was a hardware store in town, its windows filled with classic Radio Flyer toy wagons, its aisles stocked with the nuts and bolts of anything built since 1868 that needed fixing, unless, perhaps, it was built after 2000. Jim had talked to the owner of the hardware the day before, and orienting himself on George’s Diner, where they were still flipping burgers, he believed his dollar store was today a tax office.
Jim and I headed into George’s for a drink. It was noon, and we took seats on stools at a low lunch counter. I’d asked Jim if he might have preferred a chair with a back at one of the several high tables along the windows, and he shook his head, noting that high tables weren’t something they used to have back then. That wasn’t why Jim didn’t want to sit there. He just didn’t relish climbing up into the chair.
He asked the fry cook if she’d sell us hamburgers for 10 cents apiece, the place was that much of a throwback. The sixty-four-year-old cook smiled and said she wished she could. Her hair was long and gray, and her voice sounded older than she looked. She asked Jim how old he was, and he told her. One of the men at the high tables suggested we check out a Facebook page that posted lots of old pictures. I told him I’d seen that page, and expanded on Jim’s note about Overland, noting that he’d grown up here and that my story was really about a Navy destroyer that Jim had served on during the war. A burly man who might have come off a Harley nodded approvingly of the references made to Jim’s service. And then another man came in, and the fry cook asked him how old he was. The newcomer, Charlie, seemed sideswiped by the question, but rallied and told us he was ninety-three years old and had grown up in Overland.
“Wasn’t you in the Army, Charlie?” the fry cook asked.
“I was a combat medic,” he said.
Jim asked where he served, and Charlie told us he’d been in North Africa first, having been drafted in ’42. He said nothing about Italy, but noted he was part of the invasion of Southern France.
Charlie had been born on Tudor Street, where Jim lived when he worked at the dime store. They were only a year apart in age, and they must have passed each other a hundred times as kids, but they didn’t try to bridge any of the people they might have known in common. Instead, Jim was talking about the bakery on Woodson and the laundry, and Charlie nodded along, noting that the hardware store was where the laundry used to be. They mentioned the movie theater, and Woolworth’s, and Jim said he was trying to get a fix on where the dime store was. Charlie said it was just up from the hardware store, where the Game Haven is today. Jim shook his head, sure of himself. No, that building was too new.
After our drink, we drove back down Argyle, where Jim had lived, and then Olden, where the Feltzes had rented, and where he’d got drunk as a five-year-old who didn’t know what he was drinking when he’d drawn beer from a keg the morning after a block party. He pointed out where so many creeks had run, and I began to think that Overland might have been a veritable Venice back in the day. Then one of the town’s historians, who’d gotten wind of our search, phoned and told me she’d worked at the same store for Mr. Siegal right after she’d graduated from high school in 1950, and she had a picture of the place all lit up at Christmas in 1939. She told us to come on over.
The historian, Shirley Needy, showed us several three-ring binders of historical pictures of Overland that included one of the Overland Dollar Store, as it was known in 1939, with additional signage saying they sold goods from 5 cents to a dollar. Two doors opened from sidewalk alcoves into the store. Its windows were chockablock with “dependable merchandise,” featuring dolls most prominently. Draperies of holiday lights hung from the upper floors of a building that today houses the Game Haven on its ground floor.
Jim didn’t protest the evidence and said it made perfect sense that the dollar store was that far down Woodson from George’s. Siegal’s had closed the year after Shirley started working there, undone by some new commercial developments just outside town. Her pictures detailed Woodson in 1939 and 1940 at Christmas and on Frontier Day, when thousands of people, it looked like, had turned out into the streets for the celebration. There was another of Midland and Woodson with two trolleys passing; another of an appliance store interior with its white ranges and refrigerators and steel Westinghouse cabinetry; a clothing store with a pressed tin ceiling and collared shirts for 98 cents. There was another, too, of five suited men gathered at a circular table where one of them was signing a document concerning Overland Day in 1939. Another of the men, with dark hair receding and combed back like Nixon’s, was Mr. Siegal looking just as Jim remembered him.
We drove back into town and walked into the Game Haven, where huge flat screens hung from walls all the way back on either side of the old dime store. Plush sofas were set before the screens. Only one of them was occupied, by a woman, perhaps a store employee, halfheartedly playing a game that involved zombies. Jim was in his old country now, and 100 percent sure this was the place. He showed me where the cosmetic counter had been, Mickey’s counter, and the candy section, and the door into his storeroom. He walked the room all the way to the back and up again, talking almost to himself as he lifted his cane to point out the way things had been, oblivious to modern distraction. I could hear screeching as something fell from a great height during the one video game in full throttle, and then an electronic beat as the game’s characters went on the march, the explosions of small arms fire and the bellows of things lunging around them. Even with his hearing aids Jim literally couldn’t hear the game, and even if he could, I doubt he’d have taken a dim view. Like Ken Brown, and counter to what I half expected to hear from these men of another era, Jim didn’t bemoan the drift of time and didn’t talk about how much better it all was back in the day. I don’t know if it was a function of their age, if as you climbed through your nineties you shed all the dissatisfaction that might weigh you down, or whether there was something in their individual makeups that precluded the development of a curmudgeon.
I watched Jim walk around the old dime store with a smile, flipping through the pictures in his memory. He was happy, and for some time on the way back out, he stopped and stood silently where he’d told me Mickey’s old makeup counter was. He stood in that space, the way he’d stood there seventy-seven years earlier at sixteen years of age, with the whole of his life ahead of him and a slightly older woman telling him that Howell was the place her niece was from, Betty Kneemiller.
He’d lost her now, and his three sons, upending the expectation and the hope that his children would bury their parents and his wife would bury her husband. Cancer had gripped him twice, and he’d beat it twice. Maybe the war had put that fight in him, maybe he, like his ship, was capable of sustaining a hit and steaming on. But that explanation was far too mawkish, even for my sentimental self. Jim didn’t dwell out loud on what he’d lost and had resigned himself to whatever will be will be. But there was one thing he hadn’t ever been able to reconcile himself to, that had haunted him for decades and would never be still within him. It was something my family had done.