The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them

Conclusion

T. LoUIS, LIKE oTHER INDUSTRIAL CITIES, acted as a magnet, drawing young male adventurers into its vibrant and often violent center. Their noisy, messy, and unpredictable presence made the city more exhilarating—and more dangerous. Life in the streets could crush them or make them stronger. They could be “dead end kids,” overwhelmed by their environment, or heroes who beat the odds and found success. But as many reformers perceived, the cards were often stacked against them. A few of the boys from St. Louis’s rough streets became famous men and wrote their autobiographies. William Marion Reedy became a successful editor and wrote about his less fortunate friends who did not escape the crime and violence of Kerry Patch, as he had done. Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola remembered playing baseball with cast-off or stolen balls and bats, while growing up on the Hill during the Great Depression. Archie Moore got into trouble with the law and credited the CCC for giving him the chance to straighten himself out and learn the art of boxing. Chuck Berry had his own run-ins with police and the courts before he channeled his energy into rock and roll. Sonny Liston, with almost no education, did not tell his own story, but sympathetic biographers told it for him. With all his success in the boxing ring, he could not escape his troubled youth. Some of St. Louis’s “dead end kids” had brief moments of fame that brought their stories to light. Reporters came to Robert Brestol’s door after he witnessed the murder-suicide that killed his desperate parents. Little Jimmie Fleming met a priest named Peter Dunne and became the first resident of Father Dunne’s Newsboys’ Home and Protectorate. Tommie Gleason, at the age of four, rescued his baby brother from their burning house, where their mother had left them alone. Bernard Mussman was the top-selling St. Louis newsboy in 1899; he was trying to support himself and his younger stepbrother. Emil Pretto, at the age of seventeen, tried to save his older brother by confessing to a string of robberies and later served his country during World War II. Conclusion S 128 Conclusion 129 Some of St. Louis’s neglected boys could communicate only in the primitive language of violence. In 1862, a fifteen-year-old boy named Milton Frame stabbed another boy in the House of Refuge and then escaped. Fifteen-year-old Charles Aiken set a fire that severely damaged the House of Refuge in 1865. Brothers Joseph and William Kuehls, aged thirteen and ten, tried to burn down an orphanage in 1884. In 1896, Henry Clay (also known as Tom Johnson) murdered a newsboy named William Amend during a fight over a game of dice. George William Thornton was twelve years old in 1897, when he participated in an armed robbery and allegedly killed a policeman. While still in his teens, James “Sticky” Hennessy joined Egan’s Rats and was implicated in more than one murder in the 1920s. At the age of nineteen in 1958, Macer Allen robbed a Drawing of a despondent boy that ran in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on December 20, 1959. (By Simone Irving. Used by permission, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia) 130 THE DEAD END KIDS oF ST. LoUIS sixty-one-year-old man and hit him in the head with a baseball bat, killing him. Some boys were witnesses to or victims of violence. Two young boys playing marbles discovered the body of Jeu Chow under a gasoline tank in 1899. Nine-year-old Emanuel Capraro was wounded in a mob-style shooting at the corner of Carr and Wash streets in 1927. Frank Kennebrew, age ten, witnessed the gangland murder of Nick Palazollo. Kenneth Milano, age eighteen, was found dead, with a broken neck, on the Mississippi River bank near the MacArthur Bridge in 1955. Most of St. Louis’s street boys managed to grow up and live decent lives, but that does not mean that their childhood experiences left them unscathed. Raymond Kinney, who was born in 1915, spent most of his young life in orphanages and was a resident of Father Dunne’s Newsboys’ Home in 1930. He survived the Great Depression and went on to become a substantial businessman. But his daughter believes that his early experience of rejection and loneliness took a toll on his ability to...