Googling Before Google
Who hasn’t Googled one’s name to check life’s peaks and valleys? Before Google it was tough to search the past. Fortunately, the recent digitizing of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and other major newspapers, back to "Day One" allows a reader to go back to pre-Internet days and find volumes of information at lightning speed.
I tried the free seven-day subscription on newspapers.com, and won’t bore you with what I pulled up on myself. But it’s amazing to read contemporary stories about politicians and sports legends. Search for "William Clay" (congressman from Missouri) and you'll find his arrest for protesting at Jefferson Bank in the sixties. Try "Stan Musial" and you’ll see the earliest stories about his being recalled from Rochester in the minors. Read the stories about the Lou Brock-Ray Sadecki trade.
You can see how someone getting the newspaper delivered to them on December 5, 1906, found out about the San Francisco earthquake. I looked up December 7, 1941, and October 8, 1948, and read about Pearl Harbor and the U.S. Supreme Court’s invalidating racially restrictive covenants in St. Louis deeds.
Even more amazing is that the service covers a large number of newspapers, I searched for my father’s name and found a one-inch article in the Cincinnati Enquirer from September 7, 1941, announcing that he had been called from the reserves to active duty in the signal corps. A few months later he was in England.
It’s great way to learn about school friends. Among others I found a high school classmate who became a professor at University of Chicago and a Boy Scout friend who had been an unfortunate passenger on the Air Florida flight that crashed in Washington in 1982.
When I finished having fun, I tried to think of a search which would tell me something about St. Louis. I searched the N word and found that it had been printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its predecessor 4,932 times since 1878. Some were ads for racist books, such as "Ten Little N... " and what I presume was either a prequel or a sequel, "Nine Little N.…" One was a lost-and-found item for a dog of that name. The casual use of the N word in ads and in quotes and occasionally in the context of a description was striking and seemed as normal as when I heard Governor George Wallace use the word in the 1960's.
But two of the few articles stuck out:
One was the story of William Morrell, described in the issue of January 10, 1910, as a "negro boy" who risked his life to save James McCarthy, a "white boy" who had fallen through the river ice while skating. Some White men on shore did nothing to help either boy, and decided that yelling, "Drown N... drown" was a good thing, as Morrell saved McCarthy. Next to that story was an incredible account of White bigotry, illustrated by a racist cartoon. You’ll have to read that one on your own.
The other was the story of Jessie Spann, a Black Pullman porter, one of the few professions open to people of color then, who somehow scrimped up the incredible sum in 1909 of $3,250.00 to buy a house at 4526 Cottage. When he was on his regular run to Mexico, Missouri, his white neighbors smashed the windows and left a very kind note advising "persons of his kind" to stay out of the neighborhood.
To paraphrase Yogi Berra, sometimes you can learn a lot by just reading. I’ve got some more reading to do, so I’ve signed up for the year. What else should I search for? Maybe I can convince some of my less liberal friends that racism in this city goes pretty far back and still affects many things.