The end of prohibition killed the Smith brothers’ bootleg business. No matter. They opened two legal taverns, one in Eureka, one in Fenton. And when Route 66 came through Pacific, Missouri, in 1935 they opened the Red Cedar Inn.

The building’s beautiful red cedar log exterior and knotty pine interior walls hearken back to the charm you don’t get in fast food stops along the Interstate. The building has earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s now a museum and tourist center. I’ve passed the building two hundred times, driving, or riding the Frisco Railroad’s Texas Special, the Missouri Pacific’s Route of the Eagles and Amtrak’s River Runner.

For decades the Red Cedar Inn was a favorite dinner stop along Route 66. If those walls could talk…

Down the Mother Road around the corner is the Opera House, whose performances are augmented by the rumbling freight trains passing by on those two historic rail lines, originally the Frisco and the Missouri Pacific.

The two railroads run side-by side out of Saint Louis, parting at Pacific where the Missouri Pacific (now Union Pacific with Amtrak service) heads west along the Missouri River. The Frisco (now BNSF) continues along Route 66 thru Rolla, Springfield and Oklahoma City.

I remember my first train ride.

Even though I couldn’t tell time, I knew it was early. Three a.m., my mother told me. Time to get up. We jumped into our traveling clothes, grabbed our suitcases and hurried out the door into darkness, stumbling down the hill to the tracks that led to the railroad station. 

A distant engine faded in and out of my hearing, gradually growing louder as it chugged up the long hill toward Rolla. Just beyond the curve a mile down the tracks, a light beam bounced back and forth through the bare trees, shot from the revolving beacon on the nose of the Texas Special.

Full of sound and fury, the big red and silver engine rounded the curve, wagged its beacon at us, and chugged and hissed mightily as it swept into the Rolla depot. We climbed aboard the fifth car back, behind the mail car and the baggage car, and breathed that intoxicating aerosol cocktail of axle grease and diesel fuel.

Too excited to sleep, I pressed my nose against the picture window as scenic shadows rolled by, framed by the faint rose precursor to the dawn. In the early daylight, we pinballed up the aisle to a breakfast table in the dining car, where my nose pressed against another giant picture window. I anticipated the red flashing lights of the RR crossings as they whizzed past, bells clanging, car headlights stacked a dozen deep behind the barriers.

At the dining car’s breakfast table, fresh cut flowers sprouted from vases atop linen tablecloths. Real silver served up the best fare this side of the Savoy. The attention to detail befits royalty. In movies and mysteries, and in my memory, the railroad dining car is the centerpiece to nostalgia.

Fully fed, we returned to our seats. The scenery was transforming from country scape to city grid, as we approached our ultimate goal, Union Station and downtown St. Louis. 

As a kid along with my family on a shopping trip, I couldn’t wait to get to Stix, Baer & Fuller & Scruggs, Vandervoort & Barney & Famous Barr.

Mom trusted me. She knew I would head straight to the floors where they sold books and toys, and books. I read them all. Lunch time meant an a la carte adventure through the line at Pope’s Cafeteria, or Miss Hullings or the Forum Cafeteria, where awaiting on a bed of crushed ice were a hundred tiny porcelain dishes of red or green or golden Jello, each with its white cap of whipped cream. Even though I went through a cafeteria line every weekday at school, this cafeteria was different. Choices. Meat loaf and fish and chicken pot pie. Gravies and soups. Stewed tomatoes and broccoli casserole and German chocolate cake. And red Jello.

Then more shopping. More books, big as life, with pictures, and stories. By the time we hit the bunk beds at the old Mayfair Hotel, sleep was the only option.  Today, lots of things have changed. The department stores have morphed into Macy’s. Specialty shops have squeezed into Union Station, occupying spaces vacated by the Pullman sleepers and club cars of the Frisco and the Wabash and the Missouri Pacific. And passenger trains don’t go through Rolla any more.