Sometime in the spring of 1749 one or two families rowed across the mile-wide Mississippi River to settle on the west bank, some seventy-five miles below the confluence of the Missouri with the Mississippi. They were leaving the worn-out soil of their hardscrabble farms near Kaskaskia, on the Illinois Bottoms, for the virgin land of future Missouri, which had never before felt the plow. No records survive from those first months, but the effort must have been productive, as year after year more settlers made the crossing, and Ste. Genevieve was born.

That first Christmas was probably one of great joy to those French pioneers. Soon after they were repeating the centuries-old "La Guignolee" celebration, on Twelfth Night—fiddlers and singers went from door to door begging something to eat and/or the pleasures of the eldest daughters (translated from the French):

That tradition was carried to the New World from the provinces of Normandy and Brittany, and a small band of fun-loving Ste. Genevieve townspeople repeat it every year.

Those pioneers built their houses of logs, placed vertically some three feet in the ground. The steep roofs were covered with thatch, shallowed out over the porches (galleries) which became wall-less bedrooms during the steaming summers in the Middle Valley. The thatch was replaced by cedar shakes two centuries ago, but many of those vertical log houses still stand—structural curiosities which attract architectural historians from all over the world. No place in the Western Hemisphere can such an assemblage of French colonial homes be seen.

And that’s what attracted me to Ste. Genevieve. I was involved in a federal study of the town in 1966, and became hopelessly hooked. First on the town; then on the people. My study urged that somebody write a book about the town. Nobody bit, so I did. That book, The Story of Old Ste. Genevieve, was the start of The Patrice Press. At $9.95, it is now in its sixth edition, with more than 40,000 copies in print.

I’ve been told many times that this book put Ste. Genevieve on the map. Well, Ste. Genevieve was already on the map. Their people put Patrice Press on the map. I was surprised during Christmas 1987, on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the book, when I was presented with the town’s only Honorary Citizenship. Four years later they gave this aging Old Man their first Distinguished Service Award. So what’s next?

About this time last year Frances Ballinger, long the town’s leading mover and shaker, called to ask if I would be the Grand Marshal of their annual Christmas Walk parade. Now Fran usually gets what she wants, and she finally found somebody nuts enough to leave balmy Tucson to ride in an open convertible in the Midwest in December

Hey, the good old Town Car, sporting only 294,941 miles on the odometer, is riding high—not one book in that massive trunk. We left Tucson at 7:11 A.M., drove up onto I-10, and five hours later we were having lunch in El Paso’s Cracker Barrel, utterly surrounded by quaint. We fought our way through the traffic in that ancient town, more Mexican than American, and continued on southeast, within yards of the fabled, nearly dry Rio Grande, to Esperanza. There, I-10 leaves the river to head due west, and at a barren intersection ten miles west of Kent, I-20 splits away from I-10, to head northwest into Odessa.

Gluttons for punishment, we remained on I-20, into the Fort Worth-Dallas maw. We caught I-30 on the east edge of that monster and followed it through Texarkana and over to Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

Proceeding on into Little Rock, we found I-40 and took it over to I-55, across the Mississippi River from Memphis. We headed northeast, along the right bank of that greatest of North American rivers, into Missouri’s Bootheel. Soon we were at New Madrid, site of a string of earthquakes that destroyed the village in 1811-12. After more than two days of hard driving we thought we deserved a little R&R, so Kathy and I drove up to the crest of New Madrid’s levee for a long look at that enormous river, so vital to the prosperity of the pioneers of the Middle Valley. Then to a little hole-in-the-wall, Tom’s Café, for lunch. There most of the good-old-boy patrons were smoking. (With five tables, there was no no-smoking section.)

At last we pulled off I-55 onto old US 61, south of Perryville. We drove to little St. Mary, the town that was devastated repeatedly by the floods of 1785, 1844, 1973, and the most powerful of all, the flood of 1993. Each time St. Mary would rise again. Then slowly north, with the valley wall on the left and La Grand Champ, the historic big field of the pioneer French habitants on our right. There still stands the remnant of the Indian mound, which I had measured at 16’1" when researching the book in 1966. Despite being plowed annually, it’s still there and still visible. We left 61 to take the St. Mary Road into Ste. Genevieve. There, on the left, is the Bequette-Ribault House, a posts-in-the-ground cabin. I remember sitting on the porch swing there in 1966, interviewing the last Ribault brothers, Cap and Lonnie, now long gone.

Cap and Lonnie didn’t have a full set of teeth between them, and they were eating sweet corn, raw, during the interview. They were only partially successful. By the time we had finished, there was a little pile of corn kernels down between the feet of each of them.

But they were delightful guys. They explained that they were the only octoroons left in town. Their great-grandfather, a wealthy white settler, had married "Clarise, a free woman of color."

Past the great 1792 Amoureux House, also a posts-in-the-ground structure, we turned right at the Green Tree Tavern, built that same year, onto Main Street. Past the incredible Bolduc House on the left, then the Bolduc-Lemeilleur, and across the street, the Commandant’s House, the home of Jean Baptiste Valle, the last French official before the town was Americanized by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Spent many a night there, as a guest of Bernie and Vion Schram.

Ahead on the right, our place of lodging—Inn St. Gemme Beauvais—the one-time Rozier mansion. One of the newer places in town, dating to 1849, it was restored and turned into a first-class bed and breakfast place in the 1970s. I stayed there often in the ensuing years.

The Valle "desert" is a huge asphalt parking lot behind the Valle School, and that’s where the Christmas parade always assembles. There was the new Plymouth convertible, top down, but at 9:30 the temperature was already an unseasonable fifty-five degrees and the sky cloudless. Driver Kathy Jones had a blanket on the back seat, to keep our feet warm, plus a corsage for Kathy and a boutonniere for the Old Man.

Somebody gave each of us a sack of penny candy, with instructions to toss pieces to the kids along the way. We headed out into the street—a fire engine first, a convertible carrying the mayor, then us, followed by a dozen little kids—"Le Petite Chanteurs"—the little singers, under the direction of Patti Naeger. And dozens of others—Shriners on their bikes, antique and classic cars, more than two miles of vehicles.

Several hundred people lined the parade route—kids in front, three or four rows of adults in back. Forgetting our orders to conserve, we threw handfuls of candy gleefully, the kids just as gleefully scrambling to pick the stuff off the sidewalks. Soon the sounds of Christmas filled the air, as Patty and her kids started singing the ancient French carols—in French!

An hour later the parade was over, and visitors from eastern Missouri and southern Illinois flocked into the historic tour houses and browsed the cookie plates at the dozens of gift shops, winery tasting rooms, and antique shops.

That night we were serenaded again by Le Petite Chanteurs at the annual tree-lighting ceremony, after which we retreated to the Linden House for a book signing.

This morning we went for a ride in the country, for a sight that shocked me in 1966, and would be just as shocking to Kathy thirty-seven years later—the Burnt Mill. We retraced our way south on US 61 for fifteen miles. There, just north of Brewer, county road NN slants off to the right. We took it for 3.5 miles and turned south on a hard surfaced road. A half-mile ahead, at the bottom of a hill, we stopped on a bridge spanning Saline Creek. An eye-popping look to the right and there was the Burnt Mill, just as I had seen it in 1966. I stayed in the car; Kathy scrambled through the brambles to walk through the ruin. Built in 1800 by François Valle II, it burned during the Civil War.

We were guests of the Ste. Genevieve Foundation during their annual Christmas dinner that night, at Hotel Ste. Genevieve.

We took a leisurely drive up to St. Louis this morning, and enjoyed an elegant dinner at King Louie’s, a new restaurant in a century-old brick warehouse in midtown. We were guests of my old pal, Pete Rothschild and his wife, Donna. When I moved to Tucson a dozen years earlier Pete was a well-known antique dealer, just getting a start in the real estate and property-management business. Today he is one of the most prominent investors in the Midwest. But that’s not why I enjoy his company. He happens to be a dear friend.

"I want you to meet the owner of King Louie’s," Pete said, as he introduced me to a young man who obviously was in charge. "This guy is the world’s greatest authority on the Oregon Trail," he said.

"Hey," he responded, "my dad’s really into trails—could you possibly meet him?" the owner said. "He’s here, in the bar."

So we walked into the next room to meet the owner’s dad. Bug-eyed, we looked at each other—his dad is John McGuire, lead feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I took John to lunch the first week, if not the first day, that he came to work for the P-D, a good thirty years earlier. We were still laughing and talking about the old days forty-five minutes later.

Breakfast at IHOP with our good friends, John and Joan Hegedus, was a good way to start our travel day. John was the drummer on each of the four recordings we made with my old traditional jazz group, Tiger Rag Forever, in the 1970s. They are great friends to this day.

We proceeded down I-44, stopping in Rolla for lunch at Steak and Shake. This is a special treat for me. In the early 1950s, during my first years in St. Louis, S&S kept this Old Man alive.

Racing down the highway, we noticed the sky darkening in late afternoon. As we approached Tulsa we were in the midst of a genuine Midwestern blizzard, and how! We inched our way through the city at something like 20 mph—visibility was no more than a few dozen yards. We spotted a Super 8 sign on the right. No dickering on price this time—this was it. (Turned out to be $36.) A Village Inn was next door, and we walked through some four inches of snow, ice, and slush. What a night!

There was six inches of wet snow on the Lincoln when we got up. Kathy took a picture and started scraping it off. I started the thing and remained inside, warming it up. As she scraped the snow from the window I was amazed to see an absolutely dirty look. Good heavens, she shouldda been glad I volunteered to warm the thing up.

This time it was interstate highways almost all the way—we had to get back to the office to start shipping Christmas orders. I-44 to Oklahoma City, I-40 to Amarillo, and I-27 south to Lubbock, Texas.

From Lubbock we drove US 62 through Seminole and over to Hobbs, New Mexico, and on into El Paso for lunch. We laid $198 on the folks at the cat jail, picked up Butch and Ginger, and we were home at last—eight days all told. And was it worth it? Every last minute; every last cent.