My Pilgrimage to DeSoto
by Chris Büdel
When wading through the Indicia in Comic Books, that Postal paragraph at the bottom of the first printed page (or sometimes the inside front cover), the Publishing address and the Editorial Office address are often listed. I often wonder where the building is located and what it looks like.
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Is the Publishing Office a nondescript office-building, purely a ‘drop’ for mail, or is it the nerve-center, the beating heart of the beast, pumping out the life-blood of the company?
And so too the Editorial Offices, are they also just a place to receive mail and lend an air of legitimacy to the otherwise fly-by-night business of Comic Book Publishing, or are they the ‘brain’, the compliment to the heart, dictating the actions of the publishing house?
In the early part of the current century my parents moved back to their childhood stomping-grounds where they had met and married, Saint Louis. I had also spent many a Summer vacation in the Mound City (so named for the many Indian Burial Mounds once located there), the home of my Maternal Grandmother.
On one visit to my Parents retirement city I decided to track down an address familiar to me as a reader and collector of ACG Comic Books, that of 420 DeSoto Avenue.
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I found DeSoto on the street-map, and figured out where 420 would be, down close to the Mississippi River. I had taken my bicycle with me as I often do when visiting places where I’ll have some time to explore and look around, and set out to ride to the area I’d located on the map.
Saint Louis is a beautiful city, with an architecture attesting to a rich and magnificent past. The story I heard, and often repeat (therefore hoping that it’s true) is that Saint Louis had a catastrophic fire like the one in Chicago that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started that burnt down a large portion of that city on the shores of Lake Michigan. And as the story goes, after it’s own fire the city of Saint Louis passed laws and building codes that stated that all new construction from then on had to be of stone or brick. The result is a city where architectural marvels exist on every block — you can travel down any given street in residential Saint Louis and see an amazing building, and the next block will have one to top the best from the previous, and so on. (For a mind-blowing thrill, see the “temporary” buildings of the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair: http://washingtonmo.com/1904/index.htm.)
Saint Louis, also called the Gateway City, was also the point through which many who settled the West traveled. Located just South of where the Muddy Missouri flows into the Mississippi, becoming the Muddy Mississippi, Saint Louis was a transportation hub. The Railroads that first complimented the Riverboats and later by and large replaced them still travel through Saint Louis. Route 66, the most famous American highway before the Interstate system existed, traveled from the Windy City all the way through to Los Angeles coming across the Mississippi at the Chain of Rocks Bridge before it dropped down to Saint Louis and continued on to points West. Four Interstate Highways converge here today. This is an inner-city that until the white-flight abandonment after the Second World War was a major metropolitan business center: MacDonnell-Douglas and Trans-World Airlines were based here as well as Purina Mills; and the sweet smell of hops from the flagship Anheuser-Busch brewery still wafts over the city’s birthplace in the neighborhood called Soulard, just South of the once mighty downtown. One of the Fathers of Rock and Roll, Chuck Berry, still performs here. Dred Scott and Tennessee Williams are buried here, along with the greatness and grandeur that once was Saint Louis.
Traveling through all this in Saint Louis by bicycle is at once easy and difficult — there is a well-funded movement to plat out, mark, map, and stripe the streets of Saint Louis for bicycles to take advantage of the year-round temperate climate. (Sure, it gets cold there in Winter, but nothing like Minnesota where I live and bicycle.) The extensive bicycle trail and route system is impressive for the seeming lack of local bicyclists using it. Alas, the difficulty arises when it comes to sharing the road — perhaps the lack of local bicyclists is due to the local motorized traffic.
The slower pace of bicycle travel and the many dead-end streets (created to ‘calm’ traffic) lent themselves to my reflections on this city as I first cycled to downtown and then headed north to the Industrial area where my destination lay.
After several attempts at getting from the Mississippi River bicycle trail over to the Industrial area where the DeSoto Street address was, I finally was able to cut across using a street lined with Semi-trucks waiting to unload grain onto barges. Traveling the rough, chuck-hole filled streets, crossing over railroad tracks, I found DeSoto Avenue. Bicycling over terrain that would slow automobile traffic to a crawl, and after several missed turns and dead-ends I found the 420 address. The unassuming name carved into the stone above the doorway: World Color Press.
Part II
World Color Press. The publisher of ACG Comic Books in the 1940s through the 1960s; and to my surprise while recently grading a comic from the late 1930s, also the publisher of pre-hero DC comics.
World Color Press, later also of Sparta, Illinois, where most American Comic Books were printed until, according to a story I heard, the presses had been cannibalized so many times and were no longer able to be fixed. And so the printing went either down-river to Memphis, or to the 32% cheaper printers in Canada (due to the weakness of the Canadian dollar against the US dollar).
One local said that the vacant lot just West of the World Color Press building used to have a large building that housed the printing operation.
Today the only thing that would keep a fan from paying homage to the place that once printed funny-books (and doubtless a whole lot of other stuff, too) is the paranoia of the current owner and his minions. Upon finding the address I had long wondered about, I saw that while it still bears the name of World Color Press above the door, what goes on inside had nothing to do with printing.
Leaving my bicycle on the sidewalk I went in and looked around and spoke with a secretary who ushered me into an office where a harried dark-haired man informed me that, no, I couldn’t take any photographs of the building due to security measures made necessary by 911. (The building now houses a Chemical dealer and tanker-trucks are parked all over the property, which at nights and on weekends is surrounded by a gated and very locked cyclone fence.) I graciously accepted his refusal, leaving my card with a note that I wanted to write a story about the building, and for the owner, evidently away that day, to contact me so I could make other arrangements—maybe photographing just the doorway, or the stone above the doorway.
The older one gets, a year can pass by in the wink of an eye, and hearing nothing from anyone at 420, I went down there with my partner in crime, my Father, and furtively snapped a photo through his car window before he turned around and we beat a hasty retreat.
I really wanted to play by the rules, and maybe get some inside information from the building’s owner about how he’d purchased the building and from whom, and if there were any tales of World Color Press that would add some color to my otherwise anti-climactic story, but no dice.
You can go check it out yourself, and maybe if you’re not dressed in bicycle clothes, you can get a bit more of the story. Take exit 246B off of Interstate 70, just north of Downtown Saint Louis, head East on Adelaide for a bit and then South on North Broadway to DeSoto, turning left and heading East.
As for me, I’ll continue to dabble in this investigation and add to this later if I come up with any new information.
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