By Jo Ann Vatcha
1914–1919 The first owners of 6117 Westminster were Otto and Rosa Starck. VP of Stephens Lithographic, noted in a book called “Historical and Descriptive Review of St. Louis: Her Enterprising Business Houses and Progressive Men,” published in 1894, Otto and Rosa bought the newly built house in 1914 in our fast-growing neighborhood north of the World’s Fair/Forest Park site. Otto was 73 by then. One imagines him buying this new home at the pinnacle of his successful working life. World War I started just three years later, undoubtedly a distressing turn of events., as Starck was born in Germany. As we know from other documents, the SL Post Dispatch and elsewhere, there was increased fear and prejudice, with changes to street names (nearby Berlin Ave. was changed to Pershing), even a lynching in Collinsville, IL in 1918.
Otto Starck died just after the end of WWI, in 1919, of “apoplexy [now called stroke]” and “influenza”, during the terrible “Spanish Flu” pandemic which took the lives of 1,703 and affected over 31,500 St. Louisans, a terrifying period of history. Maybe those 5 years he spent on Westminster were a high point!
1919–1941 George McCullough was also a prominent businessman, President of the McCullough-Tumbach Company, raw fur dealers. Also featured in a book of prominent St. Louisans, and like Starck, he was also an immigrant, but from Ireland. George lived in the Westminster house for 19 years, and his sister Jennie McCullough continued to live there until 1941.
1941–1944 Edmund and Ina Hanley
1944–1951 Hez and Tillie Petty bought the house in 1944. Petty was an employee of Wagner Electric Co., whose company newsletter included mention of 10 years of service in the Packing and Shipping Dept. in 1953. In 1954, the newsletter showed a photo with three co-workers on a rabbit hunting trip.
1951–1952 Marie Dohrendorf
1952–1965 Robert and Dorothy McDaniel
1965–1968 Paul and Patricia Whelan
The Whelans lived here with their 10 kids in the 60’s. Whelan was said to have been a career military man by neighbors and St. Roch parisioners who remembered them fondly. Once in the late 70’s, one of the Whelan children, by then all grown up, knocked on the door and said he had grown up here.
1968–1972 OC and Willow Pastard
A prominent African-American activist during the 60’s, Pastard also owned a tavern in the CWE, which brought him money troubles during the lowest point of real estate values in the Skinker-DeBaliviere Neighborhood, due to “white flight” and the red-lining by the federal government, which resulted in the inability to get loans and obtain mortgages. This was well documented in my history of the neighborhood (Celebrating Skinker DeBaliviere), published in 2009.
1972 HUD To make it marketable, HUD did basic repairs: a new roof and gutters, plumbing updates, and an awful green sand-finish paint job throughout the house!.
1973–2021 Neville and Jo Ann Vatcha
Neville lived at 6045 Kingsbury with his Indian Parsee school friend, both of whom had immigrated from India to attend engineering school. Neville worked at Dennis Chemical Co., then founded his own companies, Quantum Plastics and later DMX Industries. For 8 years we lived on Nina Place. I was a teacher, then stay-at-home mom who discovered the pre-school “story time” at the little library on DesPeres and met the women of the Residential Service and Cal Stuart, director of SDCC. Dan Feinberg showed us many houses in the CWE, some huge homes which had been turned into boarding houses, and needed too much work. But Westminster felt like home, clean and spacious, and we could do the updating as we lived there. On the sidewalk were children riding their big wheels and playing with each other. We felt welcome in this racially diverse neighborhood.
Buying it wasn’t easy, and Feinberg helped us get financing, almost derailed by the flood of 1973, when it was decided that all HUD-owned property would be made available to flood victims, free for a year. Fortunately, no one wanted a house in the city! So we were able to buy it. Moving in, the young girls from next door, Mary Lou and Melissa Green, appeared at our door with rakes and brooms: “can we help?”
And so for nearly half of its lifespan, an Indian immigrant became the longest resident of 6117 Westminster, first purchased by a German immigrant in 1914, then by an Irish immigrant in the 20’s. Home ownership, American-style!
A personal note: great thanks to those who have reached out to me after Neville’s passing. My daughters Chanaya and Dina and I were so gratified that other longtime neighbors made contributions to the TIMES in his memory. I look forward to learning of a new family at 6117 on our great Westminster block.
Original newspaper source
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, November–December 2021.
