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To the Editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- document
- Additional Information
As I spent the first 16 years of my life in St. Louis, with the exception of summer holidays in Maine and Massachusetts, and a visit to Louisiana which I do not remember, it is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has done. These 16 years were spent in a house at 2635 Locust Street, since demolished. This house stood on part of a large piece of land which had belonged to my grandfather on which there had been Negro quarters also in his time; in my childhood my grandmother still lived at a house 2660 Washington Avenue, round the corner. The earlier personal influence I remember, besides that of my parents was an Irish nursemaid named Annie Dunne, to whom I was greatly attached; she used to take me to my first school, a Mrs. Lockwood’s, which was a little way out beyond Vandeventer place.
Then I was sent naturally to the now defunct Smith Academy, which was then somewhere at the lower end of Washington Avenue; I graduated from there with some distinction, having produced the Class Poem, which even now seems to me not bad.
I find that as one gets on in middle life the strength of early associations and the intensity of early impressions becomes more evident, and many little things, long forgotten recur. The occasions on which my nurse took me with her to the little Catholic church which then stood on the corner of Locust Street and Jefferson Avenue, when she went to make her devotions; spring violets, and the rather mangy buffalo which I photographed in Forest Park; the steamboats blowing in the New Year’s day, and so on.
And I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not. Of
