The earliest we know of the Suits family is in Guilford County, North Carolina. Historical maps of the area show the location of several Suits farms, and there is still a Suits Road, which Adelaide and I drove along when we visited there.  The Suitses were farmers who came from Germany some time before the American Revolution. I have seen an application to Congress from one of my ancestors asking for a pension for his service with General Gates' army. The application was signed with an X so we don't know the original German spelling of the family name.  It was probably something like "Sütz" but a variety of spellings occur in the early census records.  The spelling stabilized in its present form by the census of 1820.

Many of the residents of Guilford County were Quakers who were part of the Underground Railroad.  Because of their activity, a tax was levied on residents of the community to finance the recapture of runaway slaves. The Quakers remained, paid the tax, and continued to help escaping slaves, but my great grandfather left Guilford County with his two sons, James and Eli and settled in the little town of Butler, Illinois.

In 1862, James Suits married Margaret Stukey.  Their ninth and youngest child, born in 1888, was my father. The child was christened  "Hollis Emerson," but it was my grandfather's custom to give each of his children a nickname for everyday use.  Dad's nickname was "Dan." This nickname is part of the story of how I came by the name of Daniel.

My mother's family, the Halyburtons, came to Virginia from Scotland where they had been aristocrats.  The ruins of Halyburton castle still stand in Dirleton, a little town on the sea not far from Edinburgh.  When the family was caught plotting against James II, the castle was lost and the family hunted down.  Those who escaped made their way to America.  Somewhere along the line one of the Halyburtons  (I presume my great great grandfather ) married Martha Washington Dandridge, niece of Martha Washington. (Martha Washington, who married George Washington after the death of her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, was born Martha Dandridge.)

As Southern aristocrats, the Halyburtons were slave owners.  In view of the way the institution of slavery functioned, I presume I have a number of African American cousins.  In particular I have often wondered whether I am related to the actress, Dorothy Dandridge. 

My great grandfather, James Dandridge Halyburton (1803-1879)  married Anne Elizabeth Giles, daughter of William B. Giles, governor of Virginia.  The couple had seven children: William (1841- 1881), Frances Gwynn (1844-1924), James Dandridge (1846-1851), Thomas Giles (1848-1895), Peyton Gwynn (1850-1914), Julius Burbidge (1853-1900) and  Adolphus Twones (1856-1857).  Peyton Gwynn Halyburton was my grandfather.  In addition according to Shirlee Taylor Haizlip author of The Sweeter the JuiceJames Halyburton had an illegitimate son by Ruth Morris, Edward Everett Morris (1849-1903).

Before the Civil War, James Dandridge Halyburton had been Judge of the U.S. Federal Court of the Eastern District of Virginia.  He resigned the day Virginia joined the Confederacy, and was immediately appointed to the Confederate federal judiciary.  (Monnie always said that he was made Chief Justice of the Confederate Supreme Court, but I have since learned that, although a Supreme Court was provided for in the Confederate Constitution, sectional rivalry and political differences prevented its formation.)  Judge Halyburton did, however, administer the oath of office to Jefferson Davis when he was inaugurated in Richmond.  (This was a second inauguration: Davis had initially been inaugurated in Montgomery before Virginia joined the Confederacy.) Judge Halyburton’s role in this ceremony is doubtless what led Monnie to believe that he had been Chief Justice. 

When he was 15, Peyton Halyburton pulled a surveyor's chain in Lee's Engineers.  The family fortune was wiped out in the Civil War.  What was left was a trunk full of Confederate bonds and paper money that Monnie kept in our attic. 

After the Civil War, my grandfather became a teacher of mathematics and classics.  When his first wife died, he moved from Virginia to Texas where he married my grandmother, Ella Josephine Poe, eldest child of John Thomas Poe and Caroline Heydon Wright Poe of Groveton,Texas. (In the Southern style of giving children informal first names, her parents named her "Ella," a name she detested.  She always signed herself "Eleanor."  We kids called her "Mommom.")  Julius and Fannie Lee had no children, and the only child of Peyton and Ella Poe Halyburton, born in Dallas, was my mother, Dorothy Dandridge Halyburton. 

When my grandfather Peyton Halyburton was passed over for an academic promotion that he thought he deserved, he resigned his position.  Bitter resentment over what he perceived as a slight held him captive the rest of his days. "He should," my mother once told me, "have just shrugged it off and got on with his life." In any case, the little family left Texas, and after moving several times, finally settled in St. Louis, Missouri. 

It took elaborate maneuvering by the fates to bring my parents together.  Since my father's family was large and poor, he left Butler on completion of the eighth grade and went to Granite City, near St. Louis, to earn his living.  His first job was telegraph messenger boy, but one day, making a delivery to the office of the Brown Shoe Company, he was spotted by the head of the firm and offered a job.  He worked hard at learning the shoe business and was ultimately promoted to manager of a branch factory in Louisiana, Missouri. 

One evening, he happened to attend a high school graduation ceremony at which the speaker, Rabbi Leon Harrison of St. Louis, told the graduating students that, although few in the class would be able to attend college, they could all get a liberal education.  He recommended that they read five books: Geike, Primer of Geology; Lecky, History of European Morals; Lubbock, Prehistoric Man; Flamerian, Wonders of the Heavens; and J. Freeman Clark, Ten Great Religions.

Always curious and eager to learn, my father asked his sister Lucy, in St. Louis, to get the books for him.  He read them, and was so stimulated that he saved his salary until he had accumulated two thousand dollars (a substantial sum in those days) quit his job and went back to St. Louis where he spent his days reading in the St. Louis public library.  He began with topics suggested by the five books, and followed up other interests as they developed.

In the meantime, my mother, a member of the first class to graduate from the new Soldan High School, entered Washington University.  After a long illness, during which he read Greek and Latin drama for relaxation, my grandfather died.  Needing income, my grandmother, then fifty or fifty-one, but all her life an energetic and indomitable woman,  lied about her age and got a job as secretary with Paul Brown and Company, a St. Louis stockbroker.  At the same time, my mother dropped out of her second year at the university to take a job as librarian in the Cabanne branch of the St. Louis public library. 

This was the branch where my father pursued his education.  As a result, his library studies resulted in everything to be expected from attending college, including a wife.  For, as he told me many years later, looking up one day from his reading, "There, across the room, was the prettiest girl I had ever seen."  They married June 3, 1917, and I was born, June 27, 1918.

To support his new wife, my father had taken a position as executive secretary of the National Laundry Owners’ Association.   When I arrived on the scene, he needed to increase the family income.  Due to his position, he knew a good deal about the laundry business, so in partnership with Patrick Holleran, owner of a commercial laundry catering to hotels and commercial establishments like the Pullman Company, he established and operated the Hollis E. Suits Family Laundry located upstairs from the Holleran establishment at 1517 Clark Avenue in St. Louis,.  The firm succeeded and ultimately supported a wife and six sons and sent all six to college.  When Dad retired many years later, my brothers Kingsley and McCawley took over the firm. 

(When Dad founded the business, there were, perhaps, twenty family laundries in St. Louis, but over the years as home washers and dryers improved, and as wash-and-wear fabrics were developed, the demand for family laundry service steadily eroded.  When Kingsley and Mac finally sold the business, the Hollis E. Suits Family Laundry was one of only two establishments still in operation in St. Louis. The only question was which one would buy out the other.) 

When I was born, the young couple lived in an apartment (a "flat" Monnie always called it) on Clara Avenue, just a few blocks from the Cabanne Library. My parents have told me stories about life there. 

One story relates to defiance of fashion.  In those days (World War I was nearing its close) women's dresses were still ankle length, and in the style of the time, my mother wore "hobble skirts," so called because the diameter of the hem was so small that the wearer had to hobble. My mother wanted to take me out in a baby carriage, but she knew the fashionable skirt would lead to disaster if the buggy escaped her on one of the neighborhood hills. So, in utter defiance of fashion, and probably of local notions of proper modesty, my mother took a razor blade and slit her skirts far enough to provide freedom to chase after a runaway baby buggy. As far as I know, the buggy never got away.

My earliest real memory picture dates from about that time. It may have been when we moved from Clara Avenue to a flat on De Tonty Street in South  St. Louis, or (since we lived there only a few months) it may have been when we moved to Montclair Avenue in North St. Louis.  In any case, my father and I rode in the moving van, and I have a vivid recollection of standing at the curb near the front wheel of the truck. In my memory, the wheel is immense, reaching far above my head, and the cab of the truck is correspondingly high above me.  I remember my father lifting me into the van, but I have no memory of the trip.

Shaw's Botanical Garden was within walking distance of De Tonty Street, and my mother, intent on offering the treasures of God's world to her offspring, took me to the garden.  We went up and down the rows of plants and flowers for perhaps an hour.  When we got home, I asked eagerly when we could go again.  My mother, delighted with her child's appreciation of the fine things of nature, asked what I had liked best.  She was dismayed when I told her my favorite was the concrete mixer.  Sidewalks were being repaired, and oblivious to plants and flowers, I had been fascinated by the noise and churning of the paving equipment.

The flat on Montclair Avenue was directly across the street from Principia, a parochial high school run by the Christian Science Church.  The school had an ROTC program and I delighted in watching the "soldiers" drill every day, especially when the band played.  I remember one day when my mother had given me an apple, I went across the street to watch the drill while I ate it.  One of the "soldiers" saw me looking through the fence and offered me a nickel for the apple.  I sold it to him, and according to my mother, promptly came home to get another. 

My parents were always concerned that I learn proper language.  One day when my balloon exploded, I complained that it had "busted."  "You shouldn't say ‘busted’," my mother said, "you should say ‘burst’."  A few days later, I heard a neighbor say that her son, a student at Principia, couldn't play in the band because "he had busted his trombone."  For years after that, I harbored the notion that, if incorrectly blown, a trombone would somehow burst like a balloon.

The landlord of our flat was a police sergeant named McCullen who lived a few doors up the street.  He had two daughters, Rose and Beatrice, both considerably older than I was. (The McCullens pronounced Beatrice's name with the emphasis on the second syllable: Be-AT-trice.) When my parents took me for evening walks around the neighborhood, we would occasionally encounter Mr. McCullen walking his beat, swinging his long nightstick.  He also came around in the daytime to check on his property, and I must have found these occasions frightening, for when we prepared to move to Kirkwood a couple of years later, the one thing I can remember was the assurance that in the new house, "no landlord would come poking around."

In those days, horses were still an everyday sight, and various peddlers daily toured the neighborhood in their horse drawn wagons, crying their wares. A vegetable man regularly visited the neighborhood, a ragman drove his wagon up the alley, and a mobile florist announced his presence with a call of "Flah-woos." 

The flat was heated by a coal furnace, but the window giving access to the coal bin looked out on a narrow passage (we called it a "gangway") between the houses. This left no room for a coal wagon to pull up and unload coal directly into the basement.  A coal delivery was simply dumped in a pile at the curb to await somebody with a wheelbarrow to cart it to the basement window.  We received a coal delivery one time, late in the afternoon, too late to be carted to the basement that day.  My father let me walk with him to the precinct police station where we borrowed a red kerosene lantern to mark the pile during the night.

A family named Frazier lived in the flat upstairs, and Mr. Frazier and I became great friends.  There was a large tree in the back yard, and every evening Mr. Frazier would dig a hole at the foot of the tree and pour in a bucket of water. He was also responsible for tending the furnace that heated the two apartments, and while he stoked the furnace, he and I would sometimes pretend that we were in the boiler room of an ocean liner or a riverboat on the Mississippi. 

The street lamps were gaslights, and summer evenings at dusk I could sit on our front step and watch the lamplighter make his rounds.  With a long pole, he would reach up under the big glass globe on top of the lamppost, turn on the valve and light the gas.  When he had lit the street lamp near our house, it was time for me to go to bed.  In winter, bedtime was announced by the "curfew," an evening factory whistle several miles away that we could hear.

Always concerned for my proper education, my father tried to teach me the alphabet.  He bought a set of blocks shaped like the letters, which he stood in a semicircle on the rug. Sitting on the floor with me between his knees, he would point a cane at a letter. The idea was that if I could name it correctly, he would push it over with the cane.  But, they tell me, no matter which letter he pointed to, I responded, "A. (I have no idea how my father came to have a cane.  Perhaps it had been part of his costume when men still carried them.  At any rate, that cane was around the house for many years.) 

About this time, I contracted diphtheria and spent some time in the hospital. All I remember was the stab in the butt when the doctor administered the diphtheria antitoxin, the ride to the hospital in the doctor's car, and a nurse showing me how she could "make a bed with a little boy in it." I was no sooner discharged from the hospital than I caught cold.  Although the Great Influenza Epidemic was past its peak, they sent me back to the hospital as a precaution.

The earliest memory that I can definitely date is December 1920, the birth of my next brother Kingsley.  I distinctly remember looking at him through the glass at the hospital nursery. 

One Sunday, probably shortly after Kingsley was born, my father took me to visit the extensive St. Louis railroad switching yards.  In those days almost all passenger travel and freight was hauled by steam locomotives, and like all little kids, I was fascinated by their power, noise, and smoke.  As my father and I walked around the yards, he explained how switches worked ? actually operating one to demonstrate ? and showed how the automatic couplings held the cars together. A switch engine was making up a freight train, and when it stopped nearby, the crew invited us to ride in the cab as they went about their work. I remember sitting on the engineer's seat, and watching the fireman shovel coal into the roaring furnace.  (Things were more relaxed in those days.  In this modern litigious era, I can't imagine that regulations would permit a switching crew to pick up casual passengers while they were working.)

When we got home that evening, my father, having carefully explained about steam and how a steam engine worked, proposed to demonstrate by putting an aluminum saucepan of water to boil on the stove. Somehow, he forgot the saucepan, the water boiled away, and the gas flame melted a hole in the pan.  I don't remember my mother's reaction, but she always took things in stride.  Besides, she was, if anything, more eager than my father to cater to our minds and  probably chalked the whole thing up to education. 

Indeed, it was always my mother's concern to stimulate and foster our interest in anything constructive.  At any showing of curiosity, my mother always volunteered whatever was necessary to facilitate following it up.  No matter what the project was, she was ready to encourage and foster our activity.  When research was required, she would take us to the library or to the museum.  When materials were needed, she would try to make them available.  She sent us to the lumberyard when poles were wanted for a teepee we were making from a piece of canvas my father had brought home for us. At one time, when I showed an interest in American Indian signs, Monnie took me to the St. Louis library and dug out a number of reference books for me. 

Years later, when my parents finally bought a house, they set aside a special room, always designated the "playroom," for our uninhibited activity.  There were no rules, and over time, our more energetic explorations of the world did considerable damage to the plaster walls.  Every time we took a chunk out of the plaster, however, our parents concocted a section of blackboard by painting a piece of smooth wall board with slate paint, and covered the damage.  By the time I left high school, blackboards, complete with chalk rail, circled the room.

The toys our parents provided for us were always simple, and were intended to maximize our activity and involvement. We were never given anything that provided only, or primarily, passive entertainment.  For example, despite our earnest pleas, we were never accorded an electric train until we were old enough to invent and construct signals, crossing gates and other accessories. Sitting still, watching the train run itself involved too little active participation.  On the other hand, our father ordered the lumberyard to produce about one hundred uniform brick-size blocks sawn from lengths of smoothly planed 2x4.  We used the bricks to erect complicated forts, castles, and other structures, sometimes reaching the ceiling of the playroom.  Their inevitable collapse was often the occasion for a new section of blackboard.

When our mother acquired a new piano, instead of selling the old one, she moved it into the playroom for us to take apart. We got an intimate view into the guts of a piano, and the parts themselves made interesting toys.  We devised an elaborate system of strings strung across the room to carry aerial "cars" fashioned from light wooden piano parts that we found came with screws through which a string could be threaded.   One part of the piano ultimately became a section of the roof of a clubhouse that we later built against the back of the house.

It happened that the afternoon we began to disassemble the piano, a neighbor boy was playing at our house for the first time.  When he got home, in the way mothers have, his mother asked him how he had spent the afternoon at the Suitses.  His report that we had all engaged in taking the piano apart established an image that permanently characterized us (and especially Monnie) in the minds of many other mothers of the town. 

In November, 1922 when my second brother Gwynn was due to arrive, Kingsley and I were sent to stay with the Fraziers, who by then had moved to another apartment.  I don't know where it was located, but I remember it was on the second floor, overlooking a soft drink bottling plant.  Without central heat, it was warmed by a potbellied stove in the kitchen. Aside from that, all I remember of our stay was watching activity in the bottling plant, and once eating pig's feet for supper.

Monnie wanted to name the new child after her side of the family.  Kingsley and I had names derived from Dad's side of the family.  My name came from Dad’s childhood nickname.  Kinglsey derived his name from our Uncle Kingsley, husband of Dad's sister Lucy.  Since Monnie was an only child, our only Halyburton relative was a great aunt, my grandmother's sister-in-law in Richmond, Aunt Fannie Lee Halyburton.  Aunt Fannie Lee was proud of her connection with the Virginia Lees, so she was never Aunt Fannie, always Aunt Fannie Lee. (Another thing: on Dad's side of the family, our aunts were called "ants", but Aunt Fannie Lee was always "ahnt").

Anyhow, to honor Aunt Fannie Lee, Monnie asked her to suggest a name. Aunt Fannie Lee wrote back that she would be content with whatever name Monnie decided on, so Monnie named the new child Branch Giles, after a couple of her ancestors.  The birth certificate was duly registered with that name when a telegram arrived from Aunt Fannie Lee saying "name the baby Gwynn Halyburton."  Monnie dutifully had the birth certificate changed to the new name. 

In those days (and for many years after) the factories in St. Louis were run by steam engines fired by soft coal.  Likewise, all domestic heating was done by soft coal.  The result was a filthy city, soot covered every surface.  It was impossible to keep curtains clean.  The air was so polluted that travelers approaching the city could taste it in the back of the mouth miles before they arrived.   Colds, sore throat, and assorted nose troubles were endemic. 

I suffered severely, and, on the advice of our family doctor, my adenoids were removed.  The surgeon's office was many floors up in a tall building, and the occasion must have been the first time I had ever ridden an elevator.  I still remember the strong sensation of falling when the car started its descent.

In the Spring of 1923, the family escaped to Kirkwood, a non-industrial suburb about fifteen miles west of St. Louis originally established as a bedroom community for executives of the Missouri Pacific railroad. 

We took up residence in a rented house at 338 West Argonne Drive.  The street had originally been called "Main Street," but was renamed during World War I in honor of American participation in the battle that had driven the German army out of the Argonne forest.  The hysterical "patriotism" that characterized the War had resulted in new names for many things, especially anything that had originally been known by a German name. "Schmiercase," a popular dairy product, became "cottage cheese."  A method of preparing potatoes was changed from "German fried" to "American fried." In 1917, the British royal House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became the House of Windsor.)

Our rented house was of two stories with brown shingle siding and a remarkably steep roof.  The foot of the front stair was located against the west wall, immediately to the right as you entered the front door.  A back stair ascended from the kitchen.  The front living room, immediately to the left as you entered the front door, was separated from the dining room by sliding double doors. As our parents had promised, the landlord never came around.

Now that we had a whole house to ourselves, my grandmother, whom we always called "Mommom," came to live with us.  Her room was in the southwest corner of the second floor.  One summer night when the mosquitoes were especially bad, Mommom, found many buzzing around the ceiling of her room.  Unable to reach them, she tried to smash them with a towel wrapped around the end of a long handled push broom.  To increase the probability of kill, she wet the towel thoroughly, with the result that, although she managed to clear the room of pests, the papered ceiling looked forever after like somebody with very large wet feet had trampled over it, upside down. 

The attic stair was reached through the closet in Mommom’s room, and one night on a cot in her room, I fell asleep looking at the ceiling.  I dreamt that a dwarf with huge feet was making the "footprints" by stomping around on the floor of the attic above.

Kirkwood appeared to me quite different from St. Louis. For one thing, I heard many people use the word, "purt’near."  Nobody I had known had every said that.  For another thing, where we had lived in St. Louis, a high board fence surrounded every yard, but here, yards were open and we could run freely from to another. The clear Kirkwood air was also new.  One night when I was walking down the street with Mommom she called my attention to the sky. I saw what looked like clouds, but Mommom identified it as the Milky Way, something I had never seen in the overcast sky of St. Louis. 

Another thing was the absence of wagons carrying vegetables, flowers and other merchandise around the neighborhood. But local farmers would sometimes load their wagons with produce to hawk up and down the streets.  I particularly remember the mournful cry of the watermelon man who would sing out, "WAAHddy-mellOH!" in time to the clip clop, clip clop of his horse's hooves.  We were visited weekly by Mr. Hahn, who walked the neighborhood on foot, a large basket on his arm, delivering eggs from his hens and honey from his hives.  (Years later when I studied German at the university, it struck me as remarkable that hahn is the German word for "rooster.")

Our new house had a large front porch supported by a pair of pillars, on one of which was a flag socket. I wanted to put up a flag, but Monnie thought in would be inappropriate because the country was then in mourning over the death of President Harding. I remember the dark commemorative first class postage stamp.  One cent, I think, shortly to be increased to two.

There were spaces between the floorboards of the porch, which played an important role in my religious education.  My parents sent me to Sunday school at the Episcopal Church at the other end of Argonne Drive.  I attended every Sunday for an entire month, and was called before the class and awarded a pin for my regular attendance.  If I continued to attend without missing a Sunday, I would be given additional pins that fastened on the first. 

But playing on the front porch one day, somehow (I don't remember how) I managed to lose the pin through one of the cracks in the floor.  This was a disaster!  It wasn't that the pin itself mattered to me, but I could imagine the disgrace if I were called before the class to receive an addition to the pin and had to confess I had lost the original!  The only way I could see to avoid embarrassment and disgrace was to miss Sundays periodically so my attendance would never earn a second pin.  Such is the logic of a five-year-old.  But it worked.  I never received a second attendance award. 

Directly across the street from our house lived a family named Peters with two teen-age children.  The son, Robert, a high school student, was fascinated by science, an interest he shared with my father, who was always eager to try experiments and to learn new things. Robert Peters and my father would sometimes get together and run scientific experiments.  I remember they once set up an electrolysis experiment in our kitchen sink to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water. Actually, although my father had left school after the eighth grade, he had learned the most important lesson that education can impart: that learning is exciting and that the more you learn, the more exciting it becomes. In many respects, my father was one of the most knowledgeable, best educated men I have ever encountered.  He served ten years as chairman of the Kirkwood School Board, in which capacity he signed my high school diploma.  Yet, like many in his situation, he had an exaggerated respect for formal schooling.  Even while I was in high school, he was encouraging me to strive for a PhD.  "When they call you ‘Doctor’," he would say, "they'll listen to what you have to say."   (It must have had some effect.  Three of his six sons became college professors.  But I can't say it had much effect on how closely anybody listened.) 

Argonne Drive was the direct route from St. Peter's Catholic Church to the cemetery, and funeral corteges from the church would file slowly past our house.  I am told that once, while watching the procession, I declared that I was glad I wasn't a Catholic "so many of them died."

An unpaved alley ran behind the houses in our neighborhood, where household garbage was periodically collected by a man with a horse and wagon.  (He fed the garbage to his pigs, and it was said that he had become the richest man in the county.) 

In addition, each house was furnished with an "ash pit."  Ours was brick, but many were large steel tubs.  Furnace ashes (all houses were heated by coal) and all household detritus were deposited in the ash pit, to be collected periodically and hauled away. Like other kids in the neighborhood, my brother Kingsley and I regularly patrolled the ash pits to collect all the good stuff that foolish people threw away.  We would retrieve and carry home such finds as a

Alan and Mac - 1926 338 W. Argonne

perfectly good cog wheel with only a couple of teeth missing and hardly any rust, or a twisted piece from a broken floor lamp that you could blow through like a trumpet, or an old derby hat, only slightly dented.  Our favorite discoveries were old light bulbs.  These we didn't take home, but relished the burst when we threw them against the opposite side of the ash pit. We did the same with old bottles, but the effect was not so exciting.

Railroad trains were an important part of our life in Kirkwood.  The Missouri Pacific ran  "accommodations" several small passenger trains daily that took commuters into St. Louis.  The station was on Argonne, only three blocks from our house, and my father took the train daily to the laundry.  St. Louis had an extensive system of rail yards, and passenger trains would head into the yards, stop, and wait until a series of switches enabled them to back into Union Station.  The laundry was only a few blocks from Union Station, but it was still closer to cut across the railroad tracks, so my father would climb off the train when it stopped and walked across the yards to the laundry.

Regular commuters on the accommodation bought twenty-ride tickets: a piece of cardboard about the size of a calling card, around the rim of which where twenty tiny squares, one for each ride. I think the rides were ten cents each.   My father usually carried his card stuck in the band of his hat ? in the winter, a derby, in the summer, a straw boater.  To collect the fare, the conductor would come through the car and punch out one of the squares with his punch.  If you didn't have a card for any reason, the conductor would arrange with another passenger to sell you a ride.  You would pay the other passenger a dime, and the conductor would punch an extra ride out of the seller's ticket.

Since the train backed into Union Station, it was already headed properly for the return trip, but at the Kirkwood end of the line in, there was no system of tracks and switches for the train to turn around.  Instead, the engine was reversed on a turntable (a piece of track just long enough to admit the engine) set into a circular pit and mounted on a central pivot. Huge log handles protruding from either end.  To get the engine turned around, the train would enter a siding where the cars were uncoupled. Leaving the cars on the siding, the engine would switch onto another track where it could back on to the turntable.  Engineer and fireman on one end, conductor and brakeman on the other, the train crew would push the turn table around, reversing the engine so it could back to the siding and recouple to the cars.  Since the cars, them selves still faced the same direction as before, the conductor would shift the backs of the seats so passengers would face forward on the return trip, and the train was ready to head back to St. Louis. 

West of the Kirkwood station, the Missouri Pacific tracks passed about a quarter of a mile south of our house, and we could hear the approaching locomotives puffing.  Railroading in those days had progressed little beyond Civil War technology.  The clicking telegraph was still the sole communication along the lines, and station masters relayed orders to passing trains by attaching the paper to a kind of long handled hoop. They looked something like unstrung tennis rackets with a clip for the message where the handle joined the hoop.  The stationmaster would stand by the track with the hoop extended, and the passing trainman would lean out and capture the hoop with by passing his arm through it.  He would unclip the message and toss the hoop back. Of course, detailed communication between the engine and the rear of the train was impossible while the train was in motion, so it was necessary for the stationmaster to use two hoops to provide duplicates of orders to each end of the train. 

One outstanding memory of our early days in Kirkwood was the great ice storm in the winter of 1923-24.  Sleet and freezing rain covered everything with a heavy coat of ice.  Power lines collapsed, and limbs were torn off trees.  I remember sitting around the candlelit dining room table playing Croquinole with my parents.  This was played on a six sided wooden game board placed on the tabletop.  Players were equipped with little wooden rings, which they propelled from the edge of the board toward the center with a flip of the finger. The idea was to get your rings in or near the center and knock away those of your opponents.  Anyway, as we played, we could hear crashes like thunder as the weight of the ice ripped limbs off trees. I remember my father saying, after a particularly loud crash, "My, that must have been a big one."

The storm not only left us without electricity for several days, but gas and even water service were interrupted. We were warned about the water in time to clean and fill the bathtub with a day's supply.  After the storm, we hired a man to cut up and haul away the broken limbs in our yard, and city crews went up and down the street taking care of damaged trees on the median.  All this activity left behind piles of wood chips, and I remember children going along the sidewalk with a wagon, picking up the chips to burn in their cook stoves at home.

When we first moved to Kirkwood, Argonne Drive was an asphalt street, but Van Buren Avenue, which ran north and south at the west end of our block was still an ordinary dirt country road, unpaved and without curb and gutter.   So, for that matter, was Kirkwood Road, the main street of the town.  Kirkwood Road (which later became a section of U.S. Highway 66.) was paved shortly after we arrived, but it was many years before Van Buren Avenue boasted more than a dirt surface.