At 2111 Cherokee, Charles Kludas operated a cigar store after moving his business there by 1899 from the south side of the block, and he and his wife Ida raised their five children in the 1890s vintage storefront. The business was very profitable, requiring an assistant to help hand roll cigars, and the assistant and his family lived in the alley behind the store. In addition to running the cigar store, Kludas worked as a bail bondsman, and in 1935 he died on the courthouse steps after posting a bond. After his death, his son took over the business and lived with his mother, while his own family, including Jeanette Anderson, lived behind and above the store from 1935 to 1941 just as the older generation had done. During the 1930s, when thousands of St. Louis dwellings from the Victorian era still depended on outside privies, the family took pride in having an outside toilet that flushed. Anderson remembered neighborhood life through nearby residents and businesses, including a neighbor who carried a tin pail to the corner tavern for beer, a bookstore where she played with the owner's son, card games in the back room of the corner confectionary, and a circus that came once a year to a nearby lot. As the Depression worsened, the family cigar business declined, forcing her father to seek evening sales at various businesses, later take a job at Century Electric while keeping the store, and rely on her mother to sell cigars to customers who came in. In the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the old cigar store also served as a registration office for the newly instituted Draft Board, where young men of the neighborhood lined up.
