For the month of February, we’ll visit places of classic commerce, old-school businesses that do a healthy trade, despite a changing world around them. This is our second installment of five. Check back every Wednesday for a new edition.
You can pass a building so many times that the place becomes almost invisible. What’s surprising is how you can even tune out the interesting places in life, allowing them to become part of the background noise of your daily commute.
We need to stop more often. Get out of our motor coaches and look around. And places like Paul’s Bait & Tackle (4421 Chippewa, 314-773-6221) are wonderful options.
Paul’s is one of the real linchpin businesses of South St. Louis, located in a strip of Chippewa that mixes virtually every type of commerce (and residential homes) into one, big, quirky stew. Within a couple blocks of Paul’s: a nail shop, a tire shop, some taverns, a Social Security office, Bosnian businesses of varied stripes, and the big-box, chain-store mecca at Kingshighway. Not all is well, as evidenced by a nearby shuttered 7-11, a demolished Steak ‘n’ Shake, and the recently bulldozed Avalon Theater, but there’s still vitality in the neighborhood.
Marked with its distinctive, decades-old sign, Paul’s is set back from the street, and not by just a few feet. Pulling in to the driveway, you notice how different Chippewa seems from this vantage point. For instance, driving by, especially east-bound, you might not notice the small apartment complex right door, or how the neighboring daycare’s backyard bumps right up to the Paul’s parking lot. From the front door of Paul’s, you even feel like Chippewa’s slowed down, as the volume of traffic decreases by just... that... much. It’s an interesting perspective, but not as interesting as walking through the front door for the first time.
There, you’re greeted by a frog’s croak, which announces your arrival. You can say that’s pretty much the greatest idea ever, and you’d be right. After shaking off my own surprise (and delight) at that, I peered around the room, which is bigger than you might expect. It’s a fishing store, pretty much to that and that alone and everything you see has some relationship to the activity. Rods and reels and nets take up a lot of the retail real estate, while the front counter is flanked by a large section of fishtanks, which feature feeder goldfish, minnows, and the like.
Behind the counter, a couple of fridges sit, and this is where your worms are going to be coming from, and it was worms that I was there to buy. Meal worms for my chickens, who’ll devour whole handfuls, if you’d let them. And red wigglers for a composting project. I bought out 50 of each, the lots of which were doled by the kind, young clerk, who yanked and tossed the couple of deadbeats from each travel container.
The question she asked at check-out must’ve frozen my face, because she had to ask twice.
“Are you a member of our worm club?”
Until that moment, I’d never been asked this before. While confessing that I wasn’t, she understood that I did, in fact, want to be a member of the Paul’s Worm Club, which entitles you to a free cup of worms with every 11 purchases. She scratched away at numbers 1 and 2 and with that, I was now a member. (Mind you, it seems that anybody with a card could simply go home and scratch out a few more numbers. But perhaps there’s still some decency in life and that people realize that trying to get one over on a business like Paul’s Bait & Tackle allows you to be hooked through the mouth and slung into a river.)
While my attendant didn’t feel right answering questons about the business, she suggested I stop by again, to chat with owners Steve and Eunice, which, to me, are the perfect names for the ownership duo of a bait shop.
And there’s no doubt that I’ll be back. My worm needs are authentic now and so is this shop.
