This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 13, 2012 - True to her ethnic heritage, my Irish grandmother was a storyteller. It was from her that I learned the oral history of the distaff side of my family.
Though most of the characters in her tales had died long before my birth, they seemed real and immediate to me — resurrected, as it were, through her recounting. A central figure in her narrative was her father, Michael Coyne, whom she adored.
Michael immigrated to the United States in his youth and became a cop in the old “Bloody Third” District of St. Louis. Decades after his death, his great-grandson, also named Michael, would spend 11 years of his police career in the new “Bloody Third.”
The elder Michael was, by all accounts, a kind and good-natured man who held his family together after his wife died while their children were young. He had little tolerance, however, for the sentimentality many of his fellow expatriates expressed for the “Old Sod” of the country of their birth. “If things were so damned great in Ireland,” he’d ask, “what the hell are we all doing over here?”
His rhetorical inquiry always struck me as reasonable and left me warily skeptical about Arcadian memories of the “good old days.” I thought of Michael recently after a chance conversation with a young lady of my acquaintance.
She was a childhood friend of my daughters, whom we were meeting for dinner. To pass the time while we waited for the chronically tardy foursome known as “the Guzettes” to find the restaurant they’d selected, I ordered a round of drinks and asked the kid what she was doing these days.
She told me she’d just completed nursing school and had landed a good job at a local hospital. Her family wasn’t rich but part-time employment and a student loan got her through to a degree. She also had just purchased a house in a suburban community not far from where she grew up. The interest rate on her mortgage was an attractive 3.8 percent.
I amazed her by relating that, when I was her age, mortgages ranged from 16 to 18 percent — and that was with a 20 percent down payment. She shook her head and said she would have never been able to crack that nut. I could relate to the problem.
As a young cop sharing a second-floor apartment with my first toddler and a pregnant wife, I can remember wondering how in hell I’d ever afford a house for this burgeoning crew. And decades earlier — before FDR got his financial reforms enacted during the Great Depression — banks could foreclose on your mortgage even though you were current on your payments. They had the right to call your note at any time; and if you couldn’t produce the outstanding balance, they could legally seize their collateral — your house — without further explanation.
Maybe the good old days weren’t quite as halcyon as we often remember and the present isn’t quite as bleak as it sometimes seems.
That point was driven home last week when I was unexpectedly reunited with my old nightstick. I’d lent it to a friend back in the ’70s when we were both rookies. Rumor had it that the sticks the department issued could break in the clutch, so I purchased a sturdier one that doubled as a flashlight. When my buddy lost his, I let him use my extra.
Our professional paths soon diverged and it became something of a standing joke on our occasional encounters that he’d taken my nightstick hostage. When he finally took his pension a couple of years ago, I offered to make the stick his retirement present, whereupon he reluctantly confessed that he couldn’t find it. That admission wasn’t particularly surprising because wooden bludgeons had long ago been supplanted by collapsible batons, pepper mace and Tasers in law enforcement circles.
My old friend advised that he had something for me when I ran into him at a south city cop bar. He went to his car and returned with my long-lost nightstick, which he’d found while cleaning out a storage closet in his basement.
The implement looked like a miniature version of a skinny baseball bat. It was about 22 inches long with a hole bored through its thicker end, through which a leather lanyard was laced. The officer would insert his thumb through this loop then wrap the remainder of the strap around his fist, thus securing his grasp on the weapon.
The business end of the device had a metal band with a raised lip affixed to it. This was called the ferrule. Before the advent of police radios, cops on the night watch would tap the curbstone with the ferrule while walking their beats to signal their location to nearby officers. By the time we came on, that benign function was obsolete but the ferrule could still raise a considerable lump on the skull of a miscreant.
Holding the tool for the first time in decades, I marveled that we were once issued these things at taxpayer expense and that many of us found this model to be too insubstantial to get the job done.
Times do change — and not always for the worse. People my age spent their care-free youth menaced by the threat of polio and thermonuclear annihilation, only to graduate to Vietnam and disco. In fact, the primary reason that the old days look good in retrospect may be that we managed to survive them.