Now that playoff baseball is over for the Cardinals, I’ll switch to watching the Blues. My sons love hockey and they have pulled me in. It is an exhilarating sport to watch.
I was a Cards fan as a kid, but I did go to maybe ten or so Blues games at the Checkerdome.
I was raised in a suburb; well, maybe, a small town, maybe a city. Belleville, Illinois is where I grew up. Population ~42,000 when I lived there in the 1970s and 80s.
One thing is for sure, whether you consider Belleville and the countless other cities surrounding St. Louis a suburb or not, it was not St. Louis.
I had nearly zero experience with St. Louis when I lived there as a kid. No historical reference, no sense of place, no understanding of what it was/is.
I have some memories though, mostly centered on the one reason most suburbanites visit St. Louis: sports.
I was an avid Cardinal fan and sideline Blues and Big Red football fan.
My uncle, who sold cabinets in parts of St. Louis did a lot of business in the Soulard area in the mid to late 1980s. He’s a great guy and would take me along on these big city runs. It was fascinating to me. It was another world entirely. I remember Soulard being a flurry of rehabbing activity.
He also took me to a Blues game one time with relatives from a small Texas town near Houston.
It was a Blues vs. Blackhawks game at the Checkerdome. We parked in the Dogtown area in what I now know is called the Cheltenham Neighborhood.
Parking on the street was revolutionary to a suburban kid where there are dedicated parking lots for nearly every destination you can imagine. He refused to park on the massive surface lot in front of the venue to save money. I now love this as a hater of massive parking lots and a lover of free street parking and walking a few blocks to stick it to the man.
We walked through the then decidedly working class hoosier neighborhood. It was electric to me. Dangerous, loud, half-drunk, scary, all things an upbringing in the staid suburbs seek to avoid.
I remember a shirtless man in cut off jeans hollering at someone with a Blackhawks shirt and crowd goers cheering him on. This scene is etched into the memory banks.
I’ve gone back to search for this bar and I am almost certain it is still there, although memories are unreliable.
The vibe of going to the Blues games at the Checkerdome was nothing like the current higher-brow, expensive experience at the Enterprise Center today. Probably nicer sight lines and all that, but not as fun or cool…definitely not scary for a kid. The NHL was different back then as well. Fights on the ice seemed to lead to fights in the stands. It was everything I wanted to see as a kid. Your shoes would stick to the beer soaked floors if they weren’t tied tight enough. Enterprise is nice and clean and…just, different. Soulful is not a word I would consider using.
We got to see a fight in the stands that night. Even my Texas cousin was in defensive mode. Again, thrilling stuff for a kid used to the boredom of suburbia.
Are my memories clouded by time, or do others feel the fan base was completely different at the Checkerdome?
