U. City’s Bravest and Kindest
Eileen P. Duggan
Published by Eileen P. Duggan at Smashwords.com
Copyright 2010 Eileen P. Duggan
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U. City’s Bravest and Kindest
By Eileen P. Duggan
George Nieman was never a firefighter, but for half a century, he was as much a fixture at the local firehouse as his brother William, a 36-year veteran firefighter. Developmentally challenged, George led a simple life as a newspaper vendor in downtown University City, an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis. But in the end, it was George who was carried to his grave by six U. City firefighters in a procession led by a pumper truck. It is George whose memory is honored by a granite bench on the street where he sold his newspapers for nearly 60 years.
The bench, inscribed “In memory of Honorary Firefighter George A. Nieman, 1925 — 2002, from the members of the University City Fire Department and his many friends,” is the culmination of decades’ worth of small and large gestures performed by U. City firefighters for George.
On the morning of April 26, 2002, a crew of U. City paramedic firefighters answered a call on Delmar Boulevard — U. City’s main drag — and found George sprawled on a bench, frightened and covered with blood. Enroute to the hospital emergency room, it became apparent that he had been stabbed multiple times in the chest and throat.
As the news vendor underwent surgery and recuperation, the firefighters kept vigil. Over the next five months, they visited often, transported their friend from hospital to rehab center to nursing home as needed, raised money to pay for his care and even named him an honorary firefighter.
But the firefighters’ devotion to George Nieman took root some 50 years before the attack.
“We had a special relationship with George,” said Dave Card, who knew George from the time he joined the Fire Department in July 1959 until after his retirement in 1994. “He was one of us. He was like family to us, and the guys took care of him. They watched out for him, and he took good care of us.”
George Nieman was born August 6, 1925, the fourth of seven children of Harry and Johanna Nieman. He had a developmental disability and a speech impediment that were never really diagnosed, said his youngest sibling, Anne Frank. In a Social Security evaluation in the early 1960s, “they just said he was retarded,” Frank said. “Back then, … anybody that was different was retarded.”
The Niemans tried to enroll him in the local Catholic school, but it didn’t have any special education programs at the time. One of the priests suggested sending him to St. Joseph’s Institute for the Deaf, but that didn’t pan out either. So George learned only what his parents and siblings taught him.
“If George would have been born 50 years later, he probably would have assimilated into society pretty well,” because of the educational programs available later, said Captain Brian Bremer. “His speech was probably his biggest difficulty. People who weren’t [usually] around him had a hard time trying to carry on a conversation.”
As a teenager, George kept busy doing odd jobs around town, including picking up scrap for a builder and pumping chemicals for a tree service. As required of all young men at the time, George registered with the Selective Service at age 18, but he received a medical deferment. His older brother Bill sailed off to serve in World War II with the U.S. Navy. George served his country by delivering news of the war to residents on his paper route via a small wooden wagon.
In 1944, at age 19, George was assigned a newsstand at Delmar Boulevard and Melville Avenue, near a nightclub, which didn’t sit well with Johanna, said Harry Nieman Jr., George’s younger brother. George sold the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Globe-Democrat on his corner and walked down Delmar Boulevard to deliver papers to businesses along the way. One of his regular customers was the U. City Police Department, housed in the same building as the Fire Department’s Engine House No. 1.
After returning home from the war, Bill Nieman joined the U. City Fire Department in 1946. A few years later, George got a new location for his newsstand — just a block east of his brother’s firehouse. But George didn’t bum around much at Engine House No. 1 when his brother was stationed there.
“I know my brother did not want him to go over there because he was always afraid he would be bothering people,” Frank said. “He was different when he was younger, Georgie was. He wasn’t too coordinated, but he wanted to help. You were afraid he’d break something or drop something. I think my brother was always afraid he might do that.”
To put it less delicately, “Bill didn’t want George becoming a pain in the ass for anybody,” said Bremer, who joined the department in 1980. It wasn’t until Bill Nieman was transferred to Engine House No. 3 in the western portion of the city sometime around the early 1950s that George began to spend more time at the Harvard Avenue firehouse.
In those days, the Fire Department had the morning Globe delivered by the paper’s delivery service. Loren “Doc” Hewitt met George shortly after he joined the Fire Department in May 1952. “I was a rookie and I would have to [walk to the newsstand to pick up the afternoon Post-Dispatch from George] sometimes,” Hewitt said. Shortly after arriving in 1966, firefighter Larry Williams posed the idea that the department should just buy its daily papers from George, Hewitt said.
In addition to the delivery service, George had competition from some of the neighborhood paper boys. Charlie Blair grew up near the Nieman family home. While working his own paper route, Blair would see George at his stand. “He made his rounds, he had businesses he went to every day. When he was young, he used to get around quite a lot. Everybody knew George.”
Blair joined the U. City Fire Department in 1968 and served as a battalion chief for more than 20 years, remaining close to George the whole time. “George to me was like a living saint,” Blair said. “He didn’t know any bad, no evil. He’s the closest we’ll ever come to knowing a living saint.”
Around 1963, 14-year-old Bill Taylor and his brother pulled iron-wheeled wooden wagons around town on Saturday nights, delivering papers to their residential customers. They would finish their route near George’s stand. “I used to kid George that he was competitive and he’d always give me trouble when he was standing there on the corner,” Taylor said.
He and George picked up where they left off when Taylor joined the Fire Department in February 1973. “I tried to treat George just like I would anyone else,” said Taylor, whose wife is a special education teacher. “Her big thing was to try to treat the kids like there was nothing out of the ordinary, and that’s the way I did George. I’d give him as much trouble and kidding as anybody and he’d give it right back. This was what I enjoyed, and I think George liked that when people treated him like a regular guy.”
When Taylor was running the firehouse commissary before he retired in September 2000, George would let him know when the coffee supply was low. “That was his big job, making sure the coffee was ready,” Taylor said. “Some of the guys would call him our Mom. We’d come down at three or four in the morning to go on a call and [when we came back], the lights would be on, the big doors would be open and George would be sitting in the kitchen with the coffee ready. It was kind of reassuring to know that he was there.”
Just one of the guys
Being one of the guys entailed taking a lot of kidding, pranks and good-natured insults. In a mostly male world where life-and-death emergencies interrupt hours of crashing boredom, a frathouse mentality and gallows humor prevail. “There’s a demented type of humor around here and [George] fit right in with it,” said Steve Lewis, a U. City firefighter since April 1986.
One of the department’s chief pranksters, Lewis told George “Don’t go away mad” so often that George often finished the shtick for him: “I know — just go away.” In fact, Lewis tormented George so much that one of the captains once gave George a counseling form “to write me up for being a smartass,” Lewis said. “He painstakingly signed his name to it.”
Although the firefighters kidded George, “the guys were careful to make sure it was done in a proper way,” Card said. “I’d give him a hard time, but I always made sure he got over on me more.”
George was often the brunt of good-natured jokes, but he sometimes turned the tables, and “when he would nail you, nobody had a defense,” Lewis said. “Once you got nailed by George in front of everybody, people would try to counteract: ‘You just got your ass reamed by George.’ You had no defense, no comeback to that whatsoever. No recourse.”
The demented humor must have suited George. Dave Card and Capt. James Clayton were among those who hassled George by tooting the fire vehicle air horns in front of his apartment, despite George’s protestations. “A lot of times when we’d be out on the street, we’d make an extra point to drive down by George’s apartment and blow the air horns,” Clayton said. “And he’d be by the next day and say, ‘Who hit them horns?’ We always told him a dog ran out in front of us and we had to honk at it. But I think if we didn’t do that, he would have got upset.”
One time, George got the last laugh by convincing a police officer to pretend to arrest Card for blowing the horn, Card said.
George laughed a lot, said Bill Becker, a UCFD firefighter since February 1970. “We had one guy here who loved to get under his skin and make him curse. You never heard George curse too often, but when Ray would get on him, he would. He used to get George laughing probably harder than anybody. But he would also get it back, because you never knew what George was going to say. That’s when the dirty language started coming out. But George was real discreet about it, he’d never curse in front of a woman, which was cool.”
Becker claims responsibility for teaching George to make coffee circa 1972 when the firehouse traded in its old Silex glass coffee pots for a Bunn Automatic coffeemaker — one that was easy for George to operate.
“We’d go out on a bad fire or something — especially in the middle of the night — we’d come back and he’d have the coffee ready,” said Captain Clayton. “The first thing he’d ask was ‘You guys OK?’ Of course, we’d come back and say, ‘Well, we were OK until we saw you.’ Then he’d laugh about that. We used to joke with George. We always told him we’d replace him with a monkey. He told us one morning, ‘You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.’ And I’ll tell you, he was 100 percent right.
“But there are mornings that I still come down the stairs after sleeping all night — there’s mornings I can still see his spirit a little bit in the kitchen, just sitting there waiting for us,” Clayton said. “He was a magnificent man. He was a gentleman, particularly when there were ladies present.”
A life of routine
Unable to read the newspapers he sold or to write much more than his name, George didn’t bill his regular customers. He would deliver papers to businesses and offices inside City Hall every weekday, then collect cash payment on Friday. It was part of his routine, a routine that rarely varied.
“It didn’t matter, rain snow, sleet or hail, he was like the postman, he would always be here,” Clayton said.
The weather didn’t deter George “one bit,” said Hewitt. “You have to admire him for that. He had a determination that was unequalled. He got his job done the way it was supposed to be done.”
In the early morning hours of Oct. 8, 1977, something went wrong with the routine and George took a wrong turn on the way to work. When he didn’t arrive at the newsstand, his family and firefighters reported him missing. Police and firefighters conducted an extensive search for two days. They got reports of George sightings from various locations in St. Louis County west of University City, but could not find him. Finally, late in the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 9, the Missouri Highway Patrol found him at a shooting range in Eureka, some 30 miles southwest of University City.
When his buddies asked why he didn’t stop at one of several firehouses along the way, he said, “Me afraid.” How George made his way to Eureka remains a mystery.
Bill Nieman retired from the Fire Department in 1982 and died of cancer in 1986. At that time, George was living with his mother in an apartment a little more than a mile from his newsstand. When Johanna became ill soon afterwards, George’s overnight presence in the apartment helped the family postpone the inevitable decision to move her to a nursing home, Frank said. George demonstrated the ability to live on his own for two years after his mother’s move, so after her death in 1988, the family set him up in an apartment just a stone’s throw from Delmar Boulevard.
In his new routine, he would walk from his apartment on the second floor of the University Terrace Apartments to his newsstand, two blocks west. It would have been a more direct five-minute trip to walk across the street, through a short alley and across a large municipal parking lot to the newsstand. But his sister advised him never to walk through the parking lot, as it was too dangerous in the dark. So, before dawn, he’d travel about 200 feet south to Delmar, then west along the boulevard, passing the Market in the Loop plaza to Kingsland, then a short half-block north to the newsstand. He’d pick up a stack of papers, which were dropped there earlier by his distributor.
Then he’d continue a short block west to the fire station, let himself in around 5 a.m. and make coffee for the firefighters. He’d have it ready when the offgoing crew filtered downstairs from the bunkhouse and the oncoming crew began arriving after 6 a.m. for the 7 a.m. shift change.
“And George would keep that [coffee pot] filled. He had to be here for shift change,” said Captai Clayton. “He had to be here, he wanted to see all the guys.”
If George hadn’t shown up by around 6 a.m., the firefighters would go out looking for him. On one such morning in recent years, Charlie Blair found George sitting outside his apartment building wearing only his underwear, shivering in the cold. When Blair asked what was wrong, George said, “Me locked out.” He had been locked out all night. In response to Blair’s query if he was cold, George replied simply, “Little bit.”
In later years, firefighters would use this early morning time to help George with some of his personal care activities. When climbing into the bathtub at his apartment became problematic for George, the guys let him shower at the firehouse. They washed his clothes, trimmed his fingernails and several of them — including Capt. Dale Wheeler, Lewis, Clayton and firefighter Kevin Wallace — even shaved his face when necessary.
“A lot of the guys shaved him with an electric razor,” said Clayton. “Well, the electric razor wasn’t working, and one day, I went out and bought a whole bunch of shaving cream and razors and stuff and I shaved him that way. And after that, that was the only way he wanted to be shaved. … I’d sit him in a chair and wrap a sheet around him and I’d pretend I was in the barber shop.”
After getting the new shift members on their way with their coffee, George would head back east on Delmar, delivering papers to businesses. Each morning he’d stop at St. Louis Bread Co. for more coffee and pumpkin muffins.
“And [he’d] come back in the afternoon right before he was done to visit again and have some more coffee and muffies,” said store manager Pat Stewart. “I always tried to get him to eat soup when it was really cold, but he wanted his muffies.”
Shortly after Stewart arrived in December 2000 to help St. Louis Bread Co. open a new, larger restaurant across the street from its old location in Market in the Loop, she got a visit from Steve Lewis. “Steve came down and explained the situation and gave me a check,” to pay for daily breakfast for George. Unbeknownst to Lewis and the other firefighters, Stewart had already been providing George with his coffee and “muffies” gratis.
After selling papers at his corner for a while, George would return to City Hall and deliver papers to city offices. At about 10 a.m., he went next door to the Ochs Senior Center, housed in the lower level of a building behind the firehouse. There he helped serve lunch for the senior citizens and clean up afterwards. In January 1994, he was named the center’s Volunteer of the Month. He kept the plaque and certificate in his own firehouse locker, No. 32, for the rest of his life. After lunch, he’d load a couple of half-pint milk cartons and a banana into his pockets and stop by the firehouse on the way to making the Senior Center’s daily deposit at Commerce Bank.
One afternoon, firefighter Bob Rump gave George a ride to the bank, which turned out to be an eye-opening adventure. “I had to get some money, too, so I went inside with George so he could make his deposit,” Rump said. “And it was so cool. The whole bank STOPPED. Everybody came up and said, ‘Hi, George, how are you doing?’ The girls were all, ‘Hi, George … That’s my boyfriend.’ All bank operations came to a momentary stop.”
As George grew older, he began to show health problems such as high blood pressure, cataracts (or “Cadillacs,” as George called them) and bad knees. “His knees were just so bad, but he never complained,” said Wheeler. “We’d ask him more times than not — we’d offer to [go to the bank] for him and [he would say] no. That’s just the way he was. He would appreciate what you did for him, but he wouldn’t ask for it.”
George “was a tough old bird,” said Chief Bob Metcalf. “He got more dependent gradually. It got so bad, we’d take him home.”
Rump recalls looking out the engine house door regularly, “and we’d see him there walking. He never complained, but you could see something was wrong,” he said. “No matter how bad he felt, he kept on going.”
One time one of the female firefighters got money from the engine house’s soda machine fund and bought George a pair of shoes that didn’t fit, Lewis said. “They were about a size and half too small,” Lewis said. “Poor [guy] was trying to wear them. He came in and was standing in the kitchen on his toes.” Lewis asked him if the shoes hurt, and George just replied: “‘No. They fine,’” Lewis related. “He took them off and his toes were all pinched. He wore them for about two days and he didn’t tell anybody.
“He was afraid to say anything was wrong — he thought he’d go back to the hospital,” Lewis said. “He didn’t elaborate on anything if you asked him a question. He’d just answer [yes or no]. He didn’t want to inconvenience anybody.”
A routine interrupted
At about 4 p.m. Thursday, April 25, 2002, Metcalf was chatting with his firefighters in front of the engine house before going home for the day. Noticing George shuffling inch-by-inch across the street into the library parking lot, Metcalf called to paramedic Bob Rauss, “Hey, Rauss, give George a ride to wherever he’s going. He can hardly walk.”
Rauss and another crew member picked George up in a Fire Department vehicle and drove him to the bank, where he deposited $4 in cash, then they took him home.
Rauss was still on duty with B Crew at 6:15 the next morning when the call came in.
A St. Louis Bread Co. employee opening the store noticed George in distress across the street at Market in the Loop and notified Pat Stewart, who called 911.
B Crew Battalion Chief Blair was sitting in the captain’s office with oncoming C Crew Battalion Chief Don Miner discussing the previous day’s incidents. They heard a call on the police scanner about a person down in the Loop. Police officers who arrived on the scene recognized the victim and relayed the news back to the dispatcher. Seconds later, the call came on the Fire Department’s radio channel that it was George. Something had happened to George on the “safe” route.
As Blair called out to his crew in the kitchen, he and Miner jumped on the “B.C. Buggy,” the battalion chief’s Suburban.
“Everybody just hopped into a vehicle, but not everybody could go,” Lewis said.
Blair and Miner reached the scene at the same time as ambulance 2617, carrying paramedic firefighters Rauss, Joe Boushard and Virgil Shivers. Pumper 2614 was right behind with members of both C Crew and B Crew on board: Captains Steve Schmitt and Bill Hinson and firefighter Dave Wall.
“He was sitting on the bench covered in blood,” Rauss said. “I asked him what happened and he said that he tripped and fell on a board with some nails sticking out of it. He was [conscious] and talking. We realized in the ambulance checking him out — the wounds didn’t correspond to what he was saying. If he fell on a board with some nails in it, they would be in one centralized location, but they were all over.”
There were several wounds in the upper chest and neck area, one nearly severing the tongue. It was clear that George had been stabbed. They rushed him to Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where he underwent surgery.
The hospital strictly enforced its usual “victim of violence” policy of listing the patient as “John Doe” and allowing only family members to enter George’s room. Members of all three fire crews telephoned repeatedly and tried to visit but were not allowed in to see the man whose personal needs they provided daily.
After a few days of frustration, “Steve Lewis brought donuts to the nurses,” and he was allowed in to see George, said Frank, “Then Charlie Blair got them pizza, so then he got to go in. So [the nurses] were all happy. I think they hated to see Georgie leave. The Fire Department was feeding them.”
George’s recovery was slow going. After weeks at the hospital, he was transferred to the hospital’s off-site rehab facility. It became clear that George would not be able to return to his work or to live alone again. His older sister, Marge, was willing to take him in, even though she had been diagnosed with cancer the same day George was stabbed. But as it took two firefighters to move him from his bed to a wheelchair or stretcher, it was unlikely she would be able to care for him. George moved into a nursing home not far from University City.
In June, Blair and Wheeler collaborated with the Nieman family to establish a trust fund to help pay for George’s care. In all, the trust fund raised $5,658, including about $400 donated by St. Louis Bread Co. customers.
Without his daily routine, George languished. On Rump’s first visit to George at the nursing home, “my heart broke when I walked in and saw him,” he said. “I could not believe it. For a while, I thought we were going to get him back. We’d go over and push him and get him moving. That was kind of short-lived. When there was nobody there to motivate him, he just sat there and laid there. At least when he was here, he was a creature of habit. He had a sense of responsibility. He had to be in a certain place on a certain day, and that’s what kept him going.”
Even frequent visits from his buddies couldn’t hasten his recovery. Several of the top brass hatched a plan to cheer George up.
On July 1, they held a party at which George was named an honorary firefighter, complete with mayoral proclamation and his own badge and helmet. Dozens of friends, retired firefighters, relatives and customers attended the event, which made the evening news on local TV stations.
But the glow from the party faded fast, as George was back in the hospital within a week with another complication. Each time he returned to the nursing home, George’s health seemed to decline further, the firefighters observed.
Late in the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 20, A Crew Battalion Chief Bremer got a call from Frank that George was near death. He called Charlie Blair, on his day off, and they both rushed to the nursing home. It was too late. George was gone.
More than 200 people paid their respects at the funeral home — including firefighters, local business people and their patrons, City Hall employees, neighborhood residents and professors from nearby Washington University.
The family asked Blair to name six firefighters to serve as pallbearers at the funeral — he chose Chief Metcalf, Assistant Chief Mike Toomey, Battalion Chiefs Blair and Bremer, Captain Wheeler and Lewis, the sole private of the sextet. As happens in many families during times of grief, the choice created some hurt feelings among George’s second family, some of whom felt the honor should have gone to more of the non-officer privates.
Nevertheless, the pallbearers in their full dress uniforms and the many other firefighters who turned out for the funeral both in and out of uniform cut quite a swath. Wheeler delivered a moving eulogy written by Rump. The funeral procession was led by a pumper truck and included other fire vehicles.
As the procession wound its way from the church to the cemetery, it passed George’s newsstand, where several firefighters stood at attention and saluted their friend for the last time.
“At the funeral, [George] would have been impressed,” Frank said. “It was more impressive than I’ve ever seen.”
“Don’t you wish you had that many people who cared for you?” Frank said of the firefighters. “And it wasn’t phony. They were sincere about it.”
Another source of angst for all of George’s survivors was that his attacker had not been found by the time he died. Even all those years later, no one has ever been charged with the crime. “We were able to develop information on a suspect,” said a U. City Police investigator, “but because of his condition, Mr. Nieman was not able to further assist us in identifying the person who did it.”
Even after the grand funeral, the firefighters couldn’t stop caring for George. Within two weeks, Lewis got busy planning a permanent memorial to George on behalf of the firefighters. Dan Wald, owner of the plaza where George was found stabbed, agreed to provide space for a granite bench to be inscribed in George’s memory. While the bench was being crafted and inscribed, Lewis, paramedic firefighter Dave Larkin and other privates quietly raised money from their soda machine fund and from George’s friends to pay for the bench.
The bench was installed Jan. 12, 2003 just a few feet away from the wooden bench on which George had been found after the attack. About 100 people attended the dedication ceremony, which featured another ode to George written by Rump — who delivered it himself this time.
The firefighters meant only to honor George Nieman’s memory with the bench. “He was just a simple, good person,” Lewis said. “He was a kind person. If everybody really took a look in their lives, there’s somebody like George in their lives, whether or not they choose to acknowledge that person. Think about it — there’s somebody somewhere in your life that is like George. A lot of times, most people just walk on by, they don’t pay attention to them.”
Now those who walk past the bench not only pay attention to George, but see a tribute to firefighters who serve their community both bravely and kindly.
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NOTE: Many of the firefighters mentioned in this story have either retired or moved on to other departments. George Nieman’s sister Marge Kemper died in 2003.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eileen P. Duggan is a freelance journalist, writer and editor based in St. Louis, Missouri.