By Pauline Masson –
The lights in downtown Pacific create a glow of the vintage buildings that harkens back to the years when Christmas in downtown Pacific was a magic time with shoppers streaming into the mom and pop shops that lined St. Louis Street where they could buy just about anything they needed.
My friend, the late Carl Zitzman once told me a story of one of those storybook Christmases at his house.
He thought the year might have been 1923, when he was eight years old. Carl’s dad August was the town barber. His barbershop was at the corner of St. Louis and Second Street, where Brown Jerry’s Barbecue now stands. The family home that stood behind the barbershop was later moved to north Sixth Street. The lot is now a walled garden maintained by Charlene and Ron Sansone.
As the youngest of six children, Carl spent his free time milling around the downtown area. “We weren’t confined to the back yard,” he said. “We were pretty well trusted to go anywhere.”
Christmas at the Zitzman household was filled with music and good cheer. Carl’s mother Katherine was musical and taught all six of her children to play the piano. But barbers were not wealthy, especially barbers with six children. With the exception of the piano, the family lived in modest circumstances. Like most other families, modest meant, along with a bowl of Christmas candy and fruit, a cache of home made gifts mysteriously showed up on Christmas morning.
But on that morning in 1923 there was a box for Carl that was noticeably different. There was no talk of it being brought down the chimney. It was just there. It was his. And it was definitely store bought.
“I guess somebody thought more of me than I thought they did,” Carl said, feeling the need to explain it some eighty years later.
In the box was a small wind-up train engine, two or three attachable cars and some lengths of track that all fit together in a circle or oval.
“It had to have come from Mauthe’s Department Store,” Carl guessed. “That was the only place that had a line of Christmas toys.”
Carl set up the track on the kitchen table and wound the engine to make it circle the track again and again as his parents, his sister Irma, 13, and brother Gus, 18, watched. It was a sweet Christmas morning – made all the sweeter by the realization that someone thought he was special.
To get the true picture, though, of this moment in the life of an eight-year-old boy, you have to remember that boys in downtown Pacific at that time knew everything there was to know about trains. Real trains.
Back then, Pacific life revolved around trains. Big, noisy, black smoke belching steam trains rumbled into downtown as much as thirty times a day and came to a stop about a couple of hundred yards from Carl’s front door.
Boys were always welcome to hang out with the telegrapher in the depot that served both the Missouri Pacific and Frisco railroads. They were almost underfoot as the big engine was filled with water from one of four railroad water towers near the depot. Water was the fuel that drove the steam trains.
Carl recalled standing for hours in the open doorway of the Missouri Pacific RR train shop, watching the men working on engines, repairing train parts and rebuilding box cars. He had the added advantage of being allowed to hang around his uncle Joe Ottman’s carpentry shop located across the street from his house (Greg Myers/Edward Jones office is there now) and survey the work stations where a series of pulleys fed by a steam generator powered the machine tools that men used to cut, grind and polish metal tools and machine parts.
Even at the age of eight, Carl knew how things worked. He was almost too grown up for the little wind-up train but the memory of that store-bought gift never left him. At age 85 he was was still pondering who it could have been that bought it for him. Certainly it was not his parents. They would not have bought a gift for only one of three children at home, even if he was the youngest.
The likely suspect was Nellie LeSaulnier who lived in the brick house next door. To Carl she was Aunt Nellie. She was the daughter of the town pharmacist whose shop was one door east of the LeSaulnier residence.
Carl had no idea how old Nellie was that Christmas but at age eight he thought she was old. She wore long dresses of the day. But there was something about her that was extraordinary. She carried a pair of pliers and and a screwdriver in the pockets of her long skirt.
“She liked to fix thing,” Carl said. “She could fix just about anything that could be fixed with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.”
The Zitzman’s and LeSaulniers had adjoining back yards with a fence between them and a gate in the center. Carl occasionally ventured into the LeSaulnier back yard to see what Aunt Nellie was fixing. Occasionally she asked him to help her fix a gate hinge or something else that had come loose. When her radio quit working one day, she asked Carl to come over and look at it.
“She had this AM Philco radio that had four tubes and an IF transformer. The whole thing was held together with little screws.
“She had taken that screwdriver and tightened down every one the screws until nothing would work. That radio wouldn’t make a sound,” Carl recalled. “I’m not sure how I knew what to do. That was before I started building my own radios. But one by one I loosened every screw and I was able to tune the radio so it would play again.”
“I’m pretty sure Aunt Nellie was the one who bought me the wind-up train,” he said.
I have to tell you . . . through the years Carl told me dozens of stories about past Christmases in downtown Pacific. This one was reported in my first column for the Missourian for Christmas 2000.
Great story. When Carl was 8, Nellie would have been about 41. It is interesting that they both passed away in Washington, MO., Carl at age 88 and Nellie at age 68.