There was a truck stop near the race track. Nasty neighborhood. Driving through the city, there was block after block of boarded up buildings.
I recall as a naive little kid from the DC suburbs at age 14, on a bus trip to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico in 1966, passing through some part of the St Louis area heading west, and it looked like Dresden after the bombing: block after block of rubble as far as the eye could see, punctuated with the occasional isolated row house - 1 or 2 per block perhaps - some boarded up, some not. Chilling.
‘Course not as chilling as our stop down by the river near the arch thing, where a splendid gang of pre-teen white rufians were impressing my group with their collection of pistols, some more noteworthy than others, having been lifted from their deceased victims’ hands.
It created in me an almost overwhelming desire to move there, but somehow fate took me elsewhere.