Market & Tucker (096/365)

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

George Bernard Shaw (Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist. 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, 1856-1950)

TIME:  1:24 PM
PLACE:  Market St. and Tucker, St. Louis
SUBJECT:  Looking east down Market

Last week I discovered that my paternal grandfather had been involved in an automobile accident with a buggy and was arrested back in 1922.  I had sent a letter to the St. Louis Police Dept. to see if I could find out any more information and they called me yesterday stating that they had located a 1-page report on the incident.  I went to the Police Station in downtown St. Louis to pick it up after work.  There wasn’t much in the report that wasn’t already in the newspaper, EXCEPT that it named the owner of the car my grandfather was driving.  The owner’s name was Vito Geonollo aka Vito Giannola  - a leader of “The Sicilian Green Ones” gang in St. Louis during Prohibition.  Hmmmm, was Grandpa a gang member?  Maybe this could be the reason there was tension between him and the rest of his family.  Back in the late 1980’s, I was visiting with him on a Sunday afternoon; he was in a talkative mood and casually mentioned that once he had some “trouble with guns” and had to “hide away for a few days”.  He wouldn’t elaborate anymore than that.  Grandpa passed away in 1989 while I was a senior at college.  I wish I could have spoken with him more – I have a feeling that he led a very interesting life as a young man.