Ed's White Front Edwin G. Reinschmidt opened Ed's White Front Bar-B-Q on the northwest corner of Natural Bridge and Goodfellow in 1933. But the landmark restaurant might never have existed if not for an east coast fugitive, fleeing a forgery charge. Morris L. Gaskill was a wealthy automobile dealer in Lockport, New York, and one of the town's leading citizens. "Much of the automobile business was done on deferred payments," Gaskill said. "When my cashier brought purchasers' notes to me I indorsed them. The blow came one day when a bank president called me in and told me signatures were of persons that couldn't be found." Gaskill was charged with forgeries totaling $100,000. He blamed his cashier for the forgeries, who was also charged. "Somebody suggested I would be better off dead than alive." Gaskill related. "I went to Niagara Falls, intending to drown myself. I looked at the falls and braced myself with a pint of whisky, but I couldn't do it. I pawned a diamond ring to get funds and took a train to St. Louis. "For the first time in my life I tasted barbecue meat in St. Louis and found it attractive. I noticed there were many barbecue stands in St. Louis, but few clean ones. I bought a shack at Natural Bridge and Goodfellow avenues and built it up." Gaskill changed his name to William L. Rogers and called his barbecue stand Rogers White Front. Three years later, he was employing two cooks, a manager, and several waiters and busboys. He served as many as 780 cars in a day and was turning a profit of $10,000 a year. But the New York authorities eventually tracked Gaskill to St. Louis. In January of 1928, he was arrested and extradited back to Lockport, where he was tried and sentenced to two and one-half to five years upon his plea of guilty to second degree forgery. What happened next is unclear. What is known is that on October 8, 1931, Gaskill, still using the name William L. Rogers, and Nathan Zetcher registered "Rogers Famous White Front Barbecue" as a fictitious name with the state of Missouri, doing business at 5803 Natural Bridge – the northwest corner of Natural Bridge and Goodfellow where Gaskill first opened his barbecue stand. Each man had one-half interest. Reinschmidt family lore has it that in 1933 Rogers had immediate need of cash and Edwin Reinschmidt lent him the money, with the barbecue stand as collateral. Rogers disappeared almost immediately, and Reinschmidt, who had been in the trucking business, took over the restaurant and changed the name to Ed’s White Front.
If Rogers did indeed disappear, it wasn't for
for long. By June of 1934, he had opened "Rogers New White Front" at
3534 Olive Street.
Ed's White Front started out as a white wood-frame shack. As business grew, so did the shack; in the end, it was a brick building (painted white) that could seat 120. Reinschmidt picked up the building at its foundation and moved it 100 yards to the south when Goodfellow and Natural Bridge were widened.
The barbecue stand was located near the old
Army Ammunition Plant. When the munitions plant was in full swing,
Ed's White Front stayed open 24 hours a day and drew crowds three
deep at the takeout counter.
Ill health forced Edwin Reinschmidt to retire from this barbecue restaurant in 1947. He turned the business over to his son, Jim Reinsmidt, who was recently out of the Navy after wartime service, and to Reinsmidt's cousin, Francis "Herb" Norman.
The variant spellings of the name stemmed from
a sign-painting error that occurred after Edwin Reinschmidt's
father, Conrad, migrated to America from Baden-Baden, Germany, and
started his own business. They were making the sign and ran out of
room. Over the years, family members ended up spelling the name both
ways.
Jim Reinsmidt and Herb Norman worked as a team, with Norman cooking and Reinsmidt taking the orders, serving the food and joking with the customers. Reinsmidt's appetite for his own food gave him a stocky physique on a 5-foot 4-inch frame. By day's end, his secret-recipe sauce – thin, not too hot and not too sweet – would be smeared across his apron. But somehow, his trademark short-sleeved white shirt always remained immaculate.
Ed's White Front was so popular that, aside
from the advertising on its truck, the restaurant advertised only
once during its 46-year run to announce the rollback of prices to
opening-day levels in celebration of its 25th anniversary.
Ed's White Front was open from 1:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. on May 4, 1958 – the restaurant's 25th anniversary. They ran out of ribs by midafternoon, and by the time they closed, every last pieces of food was gone.
Adjoining businesses allowed the restaurant to
set up temporary tables in their parking lots. The day also proved
to be a boon for nearby food destinations such as Sam the Watermelon
Man, another neighborhood landmark.
One key attribute to the restaurant – and one that was probably fundamental to the flavor of the meats prepared at Ed’s White Front – was a huge oven that ran on charcoal that came from the Black River area of southern Missouri. Twenty pound bags of the charcoal were kept in a concrete-block building outside. The charcoal was shoveled into the oven. Maintenance of the oven helped to dictate when the restaurant would close and reopen. It shut down the Monday before Christmas, and stayed closed for the rest of December and most of January. That was when the oven was cleaned and refurbished. The staff would climb inside and clean and scrape the creosote and pine tar off the walls.
The setup resulted in flare-ups if the barbecue
cooks got careless. On occasion, the fire would get too close to the
walls, and there would be a raging inferno. A major fire did hit the
restaurant on December 4, 1966, causing more than $150,000 in
damage.
Ed’s White Front was know for its famous but unusual hamburgers. The meat cutters would set aside scraps trimmed from the pork butt, pork spare ribs and beef brisket served at the restaurant. That meat would be put through a grinder along with heels from the loaves of bread used for sandwiches. The resulting mixture would be formed into patties and coated with Golden Dipt seasoning, then dropped into one of the restaurant’s deep-fryers. The fried burgers were then placed in a double broiler with Ed’s White Front sauce, which had a thin consistency when first produced but reduced as it was kept hot in the double boiler. The Golden Dipt coating would soak up the concentrated sauce, and the burger became the stuff of legends. Ed’s White Front's coleslaw was also very popular. Herb Norman's son Ed chuckled at the commonly held notion that there was a secret recipe. "That coleslaw was basic as can be," he said. "We started by shredding fresh cabbage – not real fine, but not real coarse – into one of those big, 24-inch stainless-steel bowls. Then we’d take two of our chili bowls and fill them with sugar and sprinkle it over the cabbage, and then we’d take a gallon jug of cider vinegar and pour it out – glug, glug, glug – until it had soaked the cabbage. We’d mix it all up a little, and it was always best if it sat overnight." * * * * * Herb Norman died in 1974. Three years later, Jim. Reinsmidt decided to retire. He found no takers in the family for the business, so Ed’s White Front closed in 1979. The Ed's White Front building remains at the northwest corner of Natural Bridge and Goodfellow. But it's painted brown these days.
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