Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Opal knew her sister’s brother-in-law had come courting; she just wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Jim Henderson had come down to Arkansas from St. Louis in the fall of 1947, vowing to find himself a woman who could cook. Opal avoided the stove at all costs. She spent her days out in the cotton fields with her daddy, pulling the bolls of fluffy white cotton by hand and driving the tractor or a team of mules. She’d never dated.
But on a rainy day, when her sister suggested driving over to Paragould, she went along. And when they wound up at the courthouse, all she said was, “Oh, I can’t go in there, not dressed like this!”—because she was wearing her blue jeans and a green shirt and a red plaid jacket, and when people went to town, they dressed up. She went in reluctantly, and the next thing she knew, the justice of the peace was asking whether she was 18, and when she said, “Seventeen days short,” he motioned her forward and gave her and Jim Henderson a marriage license.
Opal half hoped her daddy would forbid her to go to St. Louis, but all he said to Henderson was, “You better not be mean to her.”
Jim wasn’t mean, just “the runaround type,” Opal says. “It was a heck of a marriage, I’m tellin’ you. I used to say I went right out of the field into the junkyard.”
Jim’s stepdad owned W.T. Prater, a coal-and-salvage yard he opened in the 1930s on Seventh Street, in the LaSalle Park neighborhood just south of downtown. For Jim, working there was a chore left over from childhood. But for Opal, it was a chance to be outside—and it was a lot easier than farming. In summer, she sat under a patio umbrella; in winter, she made a fire in a barrel to keep warm. She’d load up rags, iron, copper, brass, wine bottles, soda bottles, and milk bottles in their brand-new dump truck and take them to buyers.
When Opal’s father-in-law died, she started expanding: “I almost owned that whole block except for the tavern.” In the late ’60s, she quit buying scrap and concentrated on cars. “Jim had a guy come and build a little boom truck, and it would lift cars up four high. At one time, I had maybe 400 or 500 cars stacked in the yard,” she recalls. “I used to cut the motors out with a torch, take out the radiators, the catalytic converters… At first we paid $2 a car, then $10, $15… The day I was put out of business, I paid an ex-cop $200 for a pickup truck, and we wrecked it right there on the spot.”
“Nearly everybody liked me,” she says. “I didn’t charge ’em to look in the yard. I had a huge pile of tires, and they would pick out a wheel and a tire that fit and put them right on their car. Usually I got $10. Some of them didn’t have the money, and I’d have to give it to them. My phone still rings, people wanting parts. I have to tell them to call Mack’s or Frenchie’s.”
Opal reaches for her glasses—“These cost big money, they’re Vogue, but I can see better out of those $10 ones,” she says, nodding to a pair of readers on the kitchen table. She pages through a photo album, pointing out what’s left of sorrow. “My oldest daughter died when she was 23 years old. My baby girl, she’s dead too. My son-in-law shot and killed her.”
She chose the wrong husband, I remark.
“It wasn’t him. My other daughter’s husband killed her.” She sighs and flips more pages. “We had seven kids. I’ve got three left. And Jim’s been dead 26 years.” When she reaches the old black-and-whites, she grins at a shot of a guy crouched at the junkyard examining a tire: “Crooked Nose Jim or Tom Curly, not sure which. They were customers.”
Next is a more recent shot of the junkyard, Opal at her desk, her outdoor phone rigged to a telephone pole.
When did the city start complaining?
“Back in 1960. Ray Leisure was the alderman. He called me one Sunday night at home and said, ‘Opal, the city’s going to come next week; hang in there the best you can. I can’t go against Ralston Purina.’ They were building housing, and they said the yard didn’t look good for the neighborhood. I fought. Sorkis Webbe Jr. was an alderman then, and he was for me, and the black guy, [Freeman] Bosley Jr., was the alderman, and he didn’t go against me. But when Phyllis Young became alderwoman in 1988, Lord help me. Her and that mayor just like bars and restaurants for the Soulard
area. Bars! And not nobody working! You just don’t know what we went through after that wench became alderwoman.”
Opal’s comments relayed, Young sighs. “From the city’s perspective, there was a higher and better use,” she says. “That was an intersection where people came off the highway to enter downtown. It wasn’t very attractive, and it just kept growing.”
The city offered to buy the property; Opal refused. In 2004, the Board of Aldermen declared the area blighted. Complaints about Opal’s property included everything from the stacked tires creating a breeding ground for mosquitoes to the “large stack of old vehicles” that had been on the yard for more than a year. Opal admits the place wasn’t pretty—but it brought her about $170,000 a year in income.
In 2005, Disper Schmitt Properties submitted a proposal to develop the Ice House District. “They went to building the [Old] Rock House bar, which used to be Pat and Rose’s bar,” Opal says. “That was Rose Politte—when she left the funeral home seeing my husband, a car hit her and killed her.
“And then they set in on me. Every day, every day, every day. Mark Disper was building the Rock House, and he was down there every few minutes and photographing everything we did.” Disper could not be reached for comment.
In 2006, Opal’s property was condemned. In 2008, the city took it by eminent domain, and the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority sued Opal to get her to leave. She did so, fuming, on July 31, 2008.
In 2010, a jury in the city’s 22nd Judicial Circuit Court of Missouri awarded Opal Henderson $1,009,000 in damages.
“Yeah, I won, but where’s the money?” she says. “Mayor Slay says he ain’t gonna pay!”
Kara Bowlin, press secretary for Mayor Francis Slay, states: “LCRA is technically the responsible party, because it brought the litigation and it took the property. However, it is indemnified by Disper Schmitt Properties, LLC—Mark Disper and Dan Schmitt—so that when the judgment becomes final, payment will come from them.” (Schmitt’s listed phone number in Naples, Fla., won’t take messages; the mailbox is full. It has been for months now, judging from other reports.) “They have already paid $388,500 to acquire the property,” Bowlin continues, “and those funds will be credited against the final award. Short answer: No money will come from the City.”
“The city said the same thing in the Bottle District case,” remarks Opal’s attorney, Lynette Petruska, “and ended up paying a little over a million dollars to the landowner, because the developer did not have enough money to pay the jury’s verdict in full. That is the real story in these condemnation cases: The city lets developers take property without an ability to pay, and then the city is on the hook. You’d think they’d learn.”
Opal, who’s now 82, spends most of her time in her house. It’s dollhouse-tiny, its kitchen table a friendly mess and its living room an immaculate, slightly fussy counterpoint to her days at the junkyard. The sofas and étagère are crowded with her doll–and–teddy-bear collection. She’s owned this little log house, just up from Broadway, for 52 years. But she’s going stir-crazy.
She misses being around people. She misses her cat, Kitty—she thinks the pizza man stole him. Most of all, she misses being outside. She never felt unsafe at the junkyard—even when she should have. “In the ’70s, a guy put a pistol on me and told me to get in the trunk of my car,” she says. “I ran, and I hit the ground so hard on my knees, my gloves flew off. They got him two weeks later, after he’d killed a woman with his mother’s butcher knife. He was shootin’ craps on the sidewalk, and he had on exactly the same clothes he’d worn that day. And then about seven years ago, I got robbed again. I had brought me some fruit, and I said, ‘Well, I think I’ll go have a nectarine.’ I saw my van door open and thought, ‘Oh no.’ I had a brand-new .38 pistol in there, and my wallet had 11 $100 bills and a $300 gold piece, and I had some brand-new Confederate money in pages.”
Here at home, Opal’s scared to go in the backyard. Her red ’99 Corvette is sheathed, and she’s got a shrieking-loud alarm rigged to a motion detector that goes off at the twitch of a squirrel’s tail. She does get out, though, to Walmart or for breakfast with a friend at the Eat-Rite Diner. Her lawyers, Petruska and Chet Pleban, took her to LoRusso’s Cucina to celebrate her victory.
But it’s not yet a done deal.
The LCRA has filed to transfer the case to the Missouri Supreme Court. “If that is denied,” Petruska says, “then LCRA will have to pay the money. It is the plaintiff. Opal doesn’t care what agreements LCRA has. She is tired of waiting.”
Just about every day, she passes by her old junkyard. “I could still be there working!” she says—and she’s hale enough that it’s plausible. “Well, I never was sick hardly. I ran into the forklift once, and I broke my arm. Now I’ve got an aneurysm. I think they’re hoping I’ll die before they ever have to pay me that money.”
