Pipes and Parakeets

It would be remiss of me to talk about my childhood in St. Louis without mentioning Aunt Aggie and Uncle Otto.

Aggie was actually my father's great aunt. She had immigrated to the the U.S. as a teenager (before WWI) and married Otto Henninger (a German immigrant). Otto owned a commercial bakery in St. Louis and they lived in an old neighborhood close to the city. (I think a freeway now covers the spot where their house was.) Here's the only picture I have of her:


Yeah - the clueless looking kid sitting in the bucket of water is 'yours truly'. Must've been a hot day...

BTW - according to Google "Otto Henninger" was the alias adopted by Adolph Eichmann while he was hiding from the authorities after WWII - what a bizarre coincidence...

At any rate, Aggie and Otto were the only extended family we had growing up. They were childless and Aggie was thrilled to have us around (Otto not so much). We went there almost every Sunday after church and Aggie gave us "sodie pop" and those little ice cream cups with the sprinkles on top and the little wooden spoon thingies to eat them with.
And in the evenings (after supper) my sister and I would build card houses or go through Aggie's books of wallpaper samples (I swear she replaced the wallpaper every few months) while the grownups played Pinochle. As near as I could tell that was a game in which you occasionally slammed a card down on the table and shouted "Tr-r-rump!!" (imagine a heavy German accent) - at least that's how Uncle Otto played :-)

Otto was something of a caricature - skinny and bald with impossibly thick glasses and an ever present pipe. He had a lot of pipes - like 20 or 30 of them. There were pipe racks all over the house and apparently some were quite valuable - we were not allowed to touch them (I don't even think he wanted us to look at them.)
And while Otto collected pipes Aggie collected parakeets. I have no idea how many, but there were cages in every room. I'm sure I counted them - I've always counted everything (mild OCD) - I just don't recall the total :-)

All I can really say about Aggie is that she was a wonderfully kind and gentle woman. Otto was a bit of a grouch. I remember Aggie telling us that when he watched the Nixon/Kennedy debate he turned the sound all the way down every time Kennedy spoke. I thought that was pretty funny (like the way he yelled at the TV while watching wrestling.)

BTW - My parents took me to see Kennedy at the Crestwood Shopping Center during his presidential campaign. According to Google that was on Oct. 22nd, 1960 (I had just turned 7). I didn't really understand what he said but I do remember how the crowd reacted. But I digress...

My other vivid memory of those visits is the drive home. It was usually late in the evening and I would lie down in the back seat watching the street lights drift past as the movement of the car slowly lulled me to sleep. There's really no way to describe that sensation...

I really missed Aunt Aggie when we moved to Philadelphia. She had a stroke a few years later and didn't live very long after that. We tried calling a few times but Otto wouldn't let us talk to her - he was afraid the excitement would be too much for her (he was probably right).
It was really nice having her as a 'surrogate grandmother' during those years and I'm sure it meant as much (or more) to her than it did to us...