“Life Story,” posted each Saturday on Leader Publications’ website, focuses on one individual’s impact on his or her community. Today’s story is written by Laura Marlow.
Despite growing up a self-confessed “stinker,” Auerswald “Arch” Williams was a sweet man, said his daughter, Dawn Peery.
Williams, a longtime local butcher, died April 2 at age 90.
“He was the best dad ever,” said Peery, 54, of Festus. “Of course, everyone says that, but he really was. He was a hard worker; he didn’t want his family to want for anything. He was there for us in anything we ever went through.”
Mr. Williams, his daughter said, was an ornery little boy who was teased and bullied in school, and went on to be a hell-raiser in his young adulthood.
It may have started with the name.
“Everybody thinks he was born in Germany or something,” Peery said with a laugh. “But no; he was born out in Victoria. My aunt, Delphine, was born weighing 10 pounds, and my aunt, Mae, weighed 13 pounds. Dad weighed close to 15 pounds, and my grandma named him for Dr. Scott Auerswald, who she said saved him.
“Dad always said that’s why he learned to fight.”
His fellow students singled him out for ridicule, at first for the name but also because of his family’s circumstances.
“His parents lost their farm in the Depression,” Peery said. “They lived in a little house with a dirt floor. If they got an orange or some nuts, boy, it was a good Christmas. My dad said they would use old tire pieces to patch his shoes, and he wore clothes made out of gunny sacks. He said he got teased and beat up a lot.”
So, Peery said, it wasn’t surprising that little Auerswald, the butt of schoolyard jokes, grew up to be a disciplinary problem.
“He was – well, let’s say he was ‘dismissed’ from school,” she said with a laugh. “They told him not to come back, he was so ornery. His dad said, ‘Well, you’re going to go to work, then,’ and he got on at Rudloff’s Market in Crystal City. That’s where he got all his butchering experience.”
At 17, Mr. Williams joined the Navy and became a cook on the USS Hornet aircraft carrier.
“They came into port and gave him a 24-hour pass,” Peery said. “He promptly hitchhiked home. A week later he showed up back at the ship, just as it was getting ready to set sail.
And the stories – oh my gosh!
“He told how they took alcohol from the torpedoes, and they’d mix it with orange juice and get drunk on it. One of the men at the funeral was talking about it last night. He said, ‘That’s probably why your dad lived so long; he was full of that torpedo juice.’
“I remember him telling how the ship was in a huge typhoon in the Philippines. He said he went down and strapped himself into his bunk and held on till it was all over.”
Once back in the States, Mr. Williams returned to his butcher profession. He found, his daughter said, he had a knack for helping struggling stores.
“He worked at Bettendorf stores and at Schnucks stores all over,” Peery said. “He liked that they would send him in to a store that needed help; he’d go in and clean out all the meat cases and get them all clean and ready, then show them how to slice meat and package it the right way.”
Around this time Auerswald became Arch, and the belligerent teen became a businessman.
“In the 60s, he opened up Arch and Pete’s House of Choice Meats, where Thai Rama is now,” Peery said. “It was him and my uncle, Pete Johnston. In the 70s, he opened up Big Bear Cigar and Tobacco – he couldn’t call it a liquor store, because it was across from First Baptist Church.”
In between business ventures, he always went back to butchering to pay the bills for his family, which included his wife and three children.
The birth of their son, Dirk, who was mentally challenged, meant a major change in the Williamses’ lives. But Peery says her parents took it in their stride.
“Their life was taking care of Dirk,” she said. “It was really hard sometimes, because the kids in the neighborhood made fun of him.”
Back then, people weren’t as understanding about those with mental challenges, and the family’s options for helping their son socialize were limited.
“They didn’t go anywhere in their lives without Dirk with them,” Peery said of her parents. “That was tough on Dirk sometimes. Their friends were his friends, but they were so much older than Dirk. He didn’t really get the chance to be around people his own age.
“They protected him, sometimes, too much. One time (a group of family members) had been on the roof all day, replacing the roof, and Dirk had been happily traipsing up and down the ladder, helping them. My dad came home and just pitched a fit. They were so afraid something would happen to him.”
After his wife died in 2007, Mr. Williams and his son settled into a small Festus apartment. Mr. Williams may have slowed down physically, but he remained what his daughter called “the life of the party,” and regaled family and friends with his stories.
“He told us about his dad, and we all said, ‘It’s no wonder you were such a stinker,’” Peery said. “He told how one day, his dad was milking the cow when it kicked him hard enough to hurt his back. Dad said my grandpa got so mad, he went in the house and got the shotgun and shot that cow.
“Dad also told about how his grandpa, my great-grandfather, supposedly got in an argument with a bartender about the price of whiskey, and jumped behind the bar and bit the guy’s ear off.
“Then Dad would sit there and wonder why my boys are so ornery. I just say ‘Well, duh!’”
But however high spirited he may have been as a child, the adult Arch Williams was a kind and caring man, and extraordinarily soft-hearted when it came to his children.
“He never spanked us or anything. All he had to do was give a stern look and we knew we better shape up,” Peery said. “He was an honorable man. He loved his family so much. I lost the most important man in my life. My daddy was my hero.”
