Mr. and Mrs. George E. Fifield and their children moved to St. Louis in April, 1917, from the Chicago area. Mr. Fifield was a buyer for the prominent Rothschild Hat Company. As they already owned property in the Chicago area, the Fifields decided to rent the house at 6163 McPherson Avenue. Mrs. Harry G. (Avis) Carlson now lives in that house and has often discussed the house and the neighborhood with Mrs. Fifield. The following is the result of an interview (by Avis Carlson) and a telephone conversation (by Sue Tepas) with Mrs. Fifield.
In 1917 the Fifield’s elder son, George Edgar, was six years old and went to Hamilton School. The building we now call “Big Hamilton” was in the process of being constructed, but was not finished until the next year, 1918. Having your children attend Hamilton School was not without its problems. “When we came,” said Mrs. Gertrude Fifield, “Waterman and Kingsbury were the only streets with bridges across the River Des Peres. The boys would cross the Kingsbury bridge by walking on top of the bridge railings. Children coming home from school sometimes pushed each other down the river banks. Because of the tree stumps and rocks on the banks, the children would then arrive home with the seat of their pants gone. I took my boys, George and Harold, over in the morning, went to get them at noon, took them back and got them again when school was through!”
The only vacant lot in the immediate neighborhood was the one where the Sherman Apartments now stand, at 6188 McPherson. Grace Methodist Church members still regret that they did not take that lot when it was offered for what today seems a trivial sum. A house had been built there by the time the Fifields arrived, but that was torn down to build the hotel. The house next door (6186 McPherson — now Taylors) was then owned by Byron Moser, a well-known local banker. “On the corner which the Motorite Sinclair station now occupies was a large beautiful Spanish-style home (the first house on Skinker — number 400) owned by Mr. Weber, who was in the wholesale grocery business, as I remember,” says Mrs. Fifield. “When the Webers moved, the house was rented to a Washington University fraternity and while the fraternity was still in there, I believe there was a bad fire in which the house was destroyed except for the walls. Then it was torn down and the service station was built. It was quite something to have a gas station right in the neighborhood.”
In 1920, the Fifields bought the house at 6179 McPherson from Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Williams who had built it and moved into it in 1911. Mrs. Fifield lives there today with her daughter Elaine, who was born in the house, and Elaine’s husband, R. W. Booth, and their family. “There were very few cars in the neighborhood, and even fewer horses. We all relied on the streetcars, which gave very good service, to get around,” Mrs. Fifield explained. “The only vacant lot on the block was the one where Tepases now live. A Mr. Woolford live there. He was the only person on the block who still had a horse — and he grew mushrooms in the manure. The rest of us hated him for the smell.”
Skinker was always very wide, but it had streetcar tracks down the middle. “With two of them,” explained Elaine Fifield Booth, “there was really only one lane on each side.” And as for her childhood remembrances, “the house next east of Mr. Woolford’s (6135 McPherson — now Talberts) raised pigeons. The colored maid used to come out and wring their necks so that she could cook them. This gave me the shudders when I was a child,” said Mrs. Booth.
The back yards were all fenced in when they arrived, remembers Mrs. Fifield. “They took you out and showed you what fence you were responsible for. You could put a gate at each end and keep the children in and the dogs out. There were few garages then — most were built later.” Most people had live-in help. “They were mostly country girls and you asked your friends and their girls for the name of someone they knew and would recommend,” Mrs. Fifield continued. “By six a.m. the front walk would be swept and the breakfast would be on the table. Our girl and Mrs. Varney’s girl, a few houses down the street, were twin sisters, and were the kind of people you were happy to have in your home. This was a very nice neighborhood. When you were downtown shopping and gave your address at 6163 McPherson, the clerks thought you were somebody,” so apparently it wasn’t just neighbor telling neighbor how nice it was.
Mrs. Fifield, now with seven grandsons and one great granddaughter, holds the title of “oldest resident in the 6100 block of McPherson and is happy to be able to share her memories of her early days in our neighborhood. She looks forward to the remembrances of other residents or former residents which will appear in this new column.
—Avis Carlson and Sue Tepas
Original newspaper source
Originally published in The Paper, November 1973.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
