Three years old--that is as far back as I remember." It was 1896, the year of the "Great Cyclone." My father, mother, two brothers and myself were living on the second floor at 3649 Wisconsin Avenue, in St. Louis, when, one day, I saw the bricks flying off the house next door to us. The man living downstairs, who weighed 200 lbs., insisted that we come there, and I remember him leaning against the door with his full weight to keep it from blowing open. I looked out a window and saw the roof blowing off the school across the street. However, the only damage to our house was a broken kitchen window.
I was born in 1893, in an upstairs room of a single flat at 1960 Arsenal Street in St. Louis. I was the third son, after William and Otto, born to my parents. Another brother, Charles (
Charlie Grimm) was born in 1898. The only daughter born was Margaret during Grover Cleveland's Administration when there was a
depression. My Daddy was a painter who drove a beer truck, harnessed to a horse, for
Weiss Beer. My father was from Munich, Germany, while my mother was a native St. Louisan. I especially remember my mother explaining about President McKinley and the
Spanish-American War during the years of 1898 and 1899. When President McKinley was assassinated I heard the bell on the firehouse ringing on the day he was buried and saw black crepe drapes hung all over the engine house.
There was a diphtheria epidemic in 1895. Both my brother Otto, and I caught it. I was more sick than Otto, but Otto died from it. I remember the day Charlie was born. I was playing on the sidewalk, not a concrete sidewalk like today, but just cinders and ashes. I had a "Poppet Show" on a string and was pulling it up and down the sidewalk. (A "Puppet Show" was made in a shoe box and at night a candle was put inside to light it.) I saw the doctor go upstairs, and then a midwife also came through the front gate. I didn't know what was happening, but when I went upstairs I "had a little brother!"
At another time when I was attending night school classes, my mother complained of feeling ill. When I left for school she was resting in the bedroom. I came home later and there was my baby sister, Margaret.
I went to Kindergarten at Shepherd School, the same school my mother had attended. It was across the street from our house. My mother had learned German in the morning and English in the afternoon, but when I went everything was in English. However, I knew German. My parents always spoke German; my mother talked in English to us but in German to my father. I stayed at Shepherd School until the fifth grade when we moved to North St. Louis.
In the meantime, my father had a steady job painting at the
Columbia Brewery at 20th and Madison. We then lived at 2912 Madison, on the second floor. I went to Penrose School until the 8th grade and Charlie went to kindergarten at Penrose.
About the time of the
World's Fair, 1903, we moved to 1617 North Jefferson, again on the second floor of a four-family flat. There were three rooms; a "front room" for the boys, a bedroom in the center, and a huge kitchen. The
plumbing facilities were outside. A hard-coal stove was in the middle room, a wood-burning range in the kitchen, but the "front room" was always cold.
I went to the World's Fair on a streetcar several times and especially recall going on the final day when everything was free. I was ten years old and was interested in all the buildings like the agriculture and transportation ones.
"The Pike," the sideshow, had all kinds of sights. There was a Wild West Show and a shooting gallery. There was a
"Talking Horse" -- I remember his name was Jim Key. The huge Ferris wheel had a flower garden planted all around it in the shape of a clock. I saw this same Ferris wheel during World War I in Paris and rode on it there. (
Actually, this had to be a new Ferris wheel, the one in Saint Louis was torn apart for scrap.) Cotton candy, called
"Fairy Floss" came in big bunches for a nickle or dime. The most I ever spent at the Fair was 25 cents that would be equivalent to $1.50 today.
I left the eighth grade when I was twelve years old, before graduation, because I wanted to go to work. I got a permit to work and worked for two years at the Friedman-Shelley Co. Those were "sweat shop" days, ten hours a day, $5.00 a week. We had moved to 2212 N. Market after the World's Fair and lived there for a year or two. There were five or six
shoe factories within ten blocks but I lived across the street from the one I worked at and came home for a lunch that my mother prepared for me. I had a hard job---worked a leveling machine. Because I wanted to be ready for high school I went to night school for three nights a week, first at Carr Lane and later at Central High School. I had the same teacher that I had in the eighth grade.
But in 1907, when I was fourteen years old I started painting at the brewery. My first work was in the bottling department. I packed in wooden boxes. Each bottle of beer cost 5 cents but employees would drink a free bottle every hour. In the winter my daddy put on extra painters and I became an apprentice painter. The winter was the only time the beer cellars, where beer was aged, were painted because the windows could be opened. In the heat of summer, ice machines were used and everything in the cellars became too wet for the paint to stick to the walls. The cellars had to be kept at 30 degrees. My daddy had six to eight painters working on his crew at the time.
In 1908 my father bought his first house at 5031 Emerson Avenue in Walnut Park. He lived there until he died. The house is still standing today.
My daddy told me about his beginnings and it always "sounded like an adventure story to me!" William was a twin, one of nine children, born in Munich, Germany, of a devout Catholic family. He knew all the Catholic Church rituals and his parents had him picked out to be a priest. He had learned a trade, painting, which he began at ten years old. Everyone in Germany had to learn some trade; the first years a boy received only his meals, no pay. At fourteen years a boy also had compulsory military training. Because William neither wanted to be a priest nor a soldier he left Munich at fourteen and worked his way to the coast. He boarded a freighter, worked as
a stevedore, and landed in Baltimore, Maryland after three weeks on the ocean. Washing dishes in a restaurant there was his first job. Because Germany had many immigrants coming to the United States, he easily picked up the English language from his fellow immigrants. ("I always thought he had a brilliant brain.") After four years as a "Hobo" learning the language, and working his way west, he arrived in St. Louis. He was eighteen years old, found a job at
Busch Brewery and lived in a
boarding house near my mother's house. He met her at a
music society program where she was an entertainer, furnishing music with her
mouth harp. These societies held concerts and plays and after they were married they were both very active, William singing choral music and always Emma helping address postcards to announce meetings. Emma Vieheller married William Sebastian saying, "She liked the smell of paint." (This was always considered a family joke.)
She had lost her mother, and her father had remarried. His child by his second wife was
George Vieheller of
St. Louis Zoo Fame. He was her half-brother and she practically raised him. Her father lived to be 96 years old. She was big-boned and heavy-set, while my daddy was more like my brother William, very slender and tall, about five feet nine inches. He had coal black hair and always wore a moustache and a
pompadour. Neither went to a dentist in their lives, never had false teeth, and he only had one tooth pulled. He died at age 60 in 1926 of "liver trouble." He would seldom take any medicine or go to the doctor; he just rested a few days whenever he felt sick. A doctor treated mother who then lived at Charlie's farm and died there in 1950 at 82.
My father had two sisters who were nuns in Germany, and they frequently wrote letters to him about their lives. One was a mother superior in the Catholic Church. William's twin, Anton, came later from Germany to the United States. He was a
shoe cobbler who first settled in Aurora, Illinois. When the government offered land grants, (This was land given free, without rent, to be used for farming.) Anton decided to move to Wisconsin and become a farmer. His son, Albert William was named after my father, and I was named after him, Albert Anton. My daddy visited them in Wisconsin while on singing society tours. A few times Margaret and I went with Daddy to visit them, too; we were the only ones of the family to do this. (Actually this isn't quite true.)
I always had an idea of being a farmer, particularly a chicken farmer. We had some
setting hens and I built a chicken yard with visions of going into the chicken business. Feed stores were located in all the different neighborhoods and people could buy corn and hay and chicken feed cheaply.
My daddy had a horse that I took care of. I was sixteen years old, and "Babe" was my responsibility. The wagon shed and stable were in the backyard. The spring wagon held extension ladders while I drove the horse to various painting jobs. A sign read "Painter, Wm. S. Grimm." The front yard of the home on Emerson had a 50 foot front lot that my daddy always kept as a garden.
There were no sidewalks or paved streets. We had to be in at nine o'clock. My daddy had a whistle and we could hear it a block away when he blew it. We liked to watch the firemen conduct fire drills at night. The harnesses at the station house hung from the ceilings and dropped down on their horses as they took off for a fire.
There was no such thing as restaurants; all entertaining was done at home. (Grandpa, I think restaurants existed prior to your childhood!) I was pals with two boys who took violin lessons. Every Sunday we went together to Pop Concerts at the Symphony that were held in the
O'Dean Building at Grand and Finney. One of the boys had a
pump organ and I bought a guitar. I took piano lessons for nine months. My Daddy wouldn't let us play anything but classical, but I would go to the
silent movies, listen to the popular tunes while the picture was going on and come home and pick out the tunes by ear.
My father insisted that Bill (William) take a musical instrument, too. He bought him a violin at a pawn shop for $7.00. He also insisted that he take lessons from the director of the singing society for nine months. By the time he was finished, he could play better than his instructor and was tuning his instructor's violin. His instructor was a overall superior musician to Bill although; he taught lessons in many different instruments. Bill practiced several hours a day, but he didn't have a chin rest on his violin to protect it from wear. Because kids dressed with suspenders in those days, just as my brother did, Bill's buckle from his suspenders wore through the bottom of his violin!
Bill also played the banjo and piano, although only the black keys. Charlie played a banjo by ear. Margaret took piano lessons from an accomplished teacher, learning popular music. My daddy painted a sign in gold leaf once and hung it on the front door of our house. It read, "Margaret Grimm, Piano Teacher, 25 cents for half an hour." In those days, we had a family band and other children who played instruments in our neighborhood would join us in our back yard to give concerts. We also used to walk around the neighborhood and serenade people on their birthdays.
My parents were members of a Lutheran Church. My mother insisted that we always go to Sunday School and church where ever our playmates lived and were attending. Sundays, my mother had her friends in for meals but my daddy was always going to music and picnic functions. He could always get up before a crowd and make a speech. My mother was more "retiring." She was busy making her own bread and noodles and going everyday to the butcher shops and grocery store across the street. I would often buy a dozen doughnuts for 10 cents to treat the horse, Babe, in the morning when she would come to the kitchen door through the open gate. People used to say, "I should have been a girl" because I was the only brother who stuck around home and helped my mother.
Charlie always had a natural talent for playing baseball. In 1916 he was playing with the Municipal League, when he tried out for the Philadelphia Athletics. He was shipped to Durham, N.C., to play in the minor league. He played a season with the St. Louis Cardinals. He was the youngest player to enter the big leagues and played in his first World Series in 1932. Later when he was a manager of the Chicago Cubs at the same time that Franklin Roosevelt was running for president, I remember seeing pictures of Charlie shaking hands with Roosevelt. (
video footage)
My daddy took me to the Turner Schools for gymnastic training. I worked out on bars, sawhorses, parallel rings, boxed and wrestled several times a week, first at the Southwest Turners and later at the Northwest Turner's Hall. I even had a horizontal bar at home that I built myself next to the stable.
A cousin of my mother's named Wendell, ran a farm on Woods Mill Road between Olive and Clayton. I went there in the summer and spent several weeks working the threshing machine and the binder, all with horses or mules. I often rode the mule up slopes that were high and thought that a lot of fun. This family had three boys my age and I would stay until I got homesick. I would take the Creve Coeur Lake Line
streetcar which started at the University City "Towers." It would take about an hour. The fare was 5 cents or two and
half pennies if your were under twelve years of age. At one time I owned a rubber-tired runabout without a top and one seat. I drove it out there with a horse and then pastured the horse at the farm until I was ready to go home.
When I was twenty four years old, I was drafted into the service. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. It was 1917, and I was drafted right after war was declared. Lots of fellows were drafted and I was glad to go. There was lots of patriotism back then. I had three months of training before I left at
Camp Funston in Kansas near Fr. Riley in
Lawrence, Kansas. The recruits left St. Louis by train from
Union Station. I served two years over seas in France.
After being shipped to France, I was with the 314th Engineers. We constructed pontoon bridges and I was under fire several times.
Every unit had a band; a Regimental Band. Because they didn't have enough men with musical instruments, those who had some knowledge of music were picked for the band. I was chosen for the Army Band and was given a tuba--the double B Bass. It got me out of a lot of work! The band was used for entertainment and funerals. The company also bought me a guitar and Les Thirolf, who had played together with me at home, was given a mandolin. We took these instruments all through Europe. After the Armistice was signed, I remained in France for nine months traveling to towns and playing at hospitals. I came back to the United States in 1919.
Two years later, in the 1920s, I was married to Minnie Wegener. She had lived in the same neighborhood as I did and I had gone out with her for two years before going into the service. We would attend
vaudeville shows together. She lived at 4551 Alcott Avenue. Her dad was a blacksmith's helper doing iron work and using the anvil. Every neighborhood had a blacksmith shop and I liked to watch them shoe horses.
Minnie worked as a telephone operator for
Shepleigh Hardware Company. We were married August 20, at the home of Pastor W. of St. Matthew Lutheran Church.
The rest of the story can be told by my children.
Author and Interviewer, B. Grimm
August 31, during the 1970s
Montauk State Park 
