THE FINER SIDE
Before making my transcontinental pilgrimage I used to wonder,
sometimes, just where the line dividing East from West in the United
States might be. When I lived in Chicago, and went out to St. Louis, I
felt that I was going, not merely in a westerly direction, but that I
was actually going out into the "West." I knew, of course, that there
was a vast amount of "West" lying beyond St. Louis, but I had no real
conception--and no one who has not seen it can have--of what a
stupendous, endless, different kind of land it is. St. Louis west? It is
not west at all. To be sure, it is the frontier, the jumping-off place,
but it is no more western in its characteristics than the city of
Boulogne is English because it faces England, just across the way. From
every point of view except that of geography, Chicago is more western
than St. Louis. For Chicago has more "wallop" than St. Louis, and
"wallop" is essentially a western attribute. "Wallop" St. Louis has not.
What she has is civilization and the eastern spirit of laissez-faire.
And that of St. Louis which is not of the east is of the south. Her
society has a strong southern flavor, many of her leading families
having come originally from Kentucky and Virginia. The Southern
"colonel" type is to be found there, too--black, broad-brimmed hat,
frock coat, goatee, and all--and there is a negro population big enough
to give him his customary background.
Much negro labor is employed for the rougher kind of work; colored
waiters serve in the hotels, and many families employ colored servants.
As is usual in cities where this is true, the accent of the people
inclines somewhat to be southern. Or, perhaps, it is a blending of the
accent of the south with the sharper drawl of the west. Then, too, I
encountered there men bearing French names (which are pronounced in the
French manner, although the city's name has been anglicized, being
pronounced "Saint Louiss") who, if they did not speak with a real French
accent, had, at least, slight mannerisms of speech which were
unmistakably of French origin. I noted down a number of French family
names I heard: Chauvenet, Papin, Valle, Desloge, De Menil, Lucas,
Pettus, Guion, Chopin, Janis, Benoist, Cabanne, and Chouteau--the latter
family descended, I was told, from Laclede himself. And again, I heard
such names as Busch, Lehmann, Faust, and Niedringhaus; and still again
such other names as Kilpatrick, Farrell, and O'Fallon--for St. Louis,
though a Southern city, and an Eastern city, and a French city, and a
German city, by being also Irish, proves herself American.
It is in all that has to do with family life that St. Louis comes off
best. She has miles upon miles of prosperous-looking, middle-class
residence streets, and the system of residence "places" in her more
fashionable districts is highly characteristic. These "places" are in
reality long, narrow parkways, with double drives, parked down the
center, and bordered with houses at their outer margins. The oldest of
them is, I am told, Benton Place, on the South Side, but the more
attractive ones are to the westward, near Forest Park. Of these the
first was Vandeventer Place, which still contains some of the most
pleasant and substantial residences of the city, and it may be added
that while some of the newer "places" have more recent and elaborate
houses than those on Vandeventer Place, the general average of recent
domestic architecture in St. Louis is behind that of many other cities.
Portland Place seemed, upon the whole, to have the best group of modern
houses. Westmoreland and Kingsbury Places also have agreeable homes. But
Washington Terrace is not so fortunate; its houses, though they plainly
indicate liberal expenditure of money, are often of that
"catch-as-catch-can" kind of architecture which one meets with but too
frequently in the middle west. If St. Louis is western in one thing more
than another it is the architecture of her houses. Not that they lack
solidity but that on the average they are not to be compared,
architecturally, with houses of corresponding modernness in such cities
as Chicago or Detroit. The more I see of other cities the more, indeed,
I appreciate the new domestic architecture of Detroit. And I cannot help
feeling that it is curious that St. Louis should be behind Detroit in
this particular when she is, as a city, so far superior in her evident
understanding and love of art.
Nevertheless, St. Louis has one architect whom she cannot honor too
highly--Mr. William B. Ittner, who, as a designer of schools, stands
unsurpassed.
If ever I have seen a building perfect for its purpose, that building is
the Frank Louis Soldan High School, designed by this man. It is the last
word in schools; a building for the city of St. Louis to be proud of,
and for the whole country to rejoice in. It has everything a school can
have, including that quality rarest of all in schools--sheer beauty. It
is worth a whole chapter in itself, from its great auditorium, which is
like a very simple opera house, seating two thousand persons, to its
tiled lunch rooms with their "cafeteria" service. An architect could
build one school like that, it seems to me, and then lie down and die
content, feeling that his work was done. But Mr. Ittner apparently is
not satisfied so easily as I should be, for he goes gaily on building
other schools. If there isn't one to be built in St. Louis at the moment
(and the city has an extraordinary number of fine school buildings), he
goes off to some other city and puts a school up there. And for every
one he builds he ought to have a crown of gold.
[Illustration: St. Louis needs to be taken by the hand and led around
to some municipal-improvement tailor, some civic haberdasher]
Mr. John Rush Powell, the principal of the high school, was so good as
to take my companion and me over the building. We envied Mr. Powell the
privilege of being housed in such a palace, and Mr. Powell, in his turn,
tried to talk temperately about the wonders of his school, and was so
polite as to let us do the raving.
Do you remember, when you went to school, the long closet, or dressing
room, where you used to hang your coat and hat? The boys and girls of
the Soldan School have steel lockers in a sunlit locker room. Do you
remember the old wooden floors? These boys and girls have wooden floors
to walk on, but the wood is quarter-sawed oak, and it is laid in asphalt
over concrete, which makes the finest kind of floor. Do you remember the
ugly old school building? The front of this one looks like Hampden Court
Palace, brought up to date. Do you remember the big classroom that
served almost every purpose? This school has separate rooms for
everything--a greenhouse for the botanists, great studios, with
skylights, for those who study art, a music hall, and private offices,
beside the classrooms, for instructors. Oh, you ought to see this school
yourself, and learn how schools have changed! You ought to see the
domestic science kitchen with its twenty-four gas ranges and the model
dining room, where the girls give dinner parties for their parents; the
sewing room and fitting rooms, and the laundries, with sanitary
equipment and electric irons--for every girl who takes the
domestic-science course must know how to do fine laundry work, even to
the washing of flannels.
You should see the manual-training shops, and the business college, and
the textile work, and the kilns for pottery, and the very creditable
drawings and paintings of the art students (who clearly have a competent
teacher--again an unusual thing in schools), and the simple beauty of
the corridors, so free from decoration, and the library--like that of a
club--and the lavatories, as perfect as those in fine hotels, and the
pictures on the classroom walls--good prints of good things, like
Whistler's portrait of his mother, instead of the old hideosities of
Washington and Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, which used to hang
on classroom walls in our school days. Oh, it is good to merely breathe
the air of such a school--and why shouldn't it be, since the air is
washed, and screened, and warmed, and fanned out to the rooms and
corridors? Just think of that one thing, and then try to remember how
schools used to smell--that rather zoological odor of dirty little boys
and dirty little slates. That was one thing which struck me very
forcibly about this school: it didn't smell like one. Yet, until I went
there, I should have wagered that if I were taken blindfold to a school,
led inside, and allowed a single whiff of it, I should immediately
detect the place for what it was. Ah, memories of other days! Ah, sacred
smells of childhood! Can it be that the school smell has gone forever
from the earth--that it has vanished with our youth--that the rising
generation may not know it? There is but little sadness in the thought.
Having thus dilated upon the oldtime smell of schools, I find myself
drifting, perhaps through an association of ideas, to another
subject--that of furs; raw furs.
The firm of Funsten Brothers & Co. have made St. Louis the largest
primary fur market in the world. They operate a fur exchange which,
though a private business, is conducted somewhat after the manner of a
produce exchange. That is to say, the sales are not open to all buyers,
but to about thirty men who are, in effect, "members," it being required
that a member be a fur dealer with a place of business in St. Louis.
These men are jobbers, and they sell in turn to the manufacturers.
Funsten Brothers & Co. work direct with trappers, and are in
correspondence, I am informed, with between 700,000 and 800,000 persons,
engaged in trapping and shipping furs, in all parts of the world. Their
business has been considerably increased of late years by the
installation of a trappers' information bureau and supply department for
the accommodation of those who send them furs, and also by the marketing
of artificial animal baits. In this way, and further by making it a rule
to send checks in payment for furs received from trappers, on the same
day shipments arrive, this company has built up for itself an enormous
good will at the original sources of supply.
The furs come from every State in the Union, from every Province in
Canada, and from Alaska, being shipped in, during the trapping season,
at the rate of about two thousand lots a day, these lots containing
anywhere from five to five hundred pelts each.
The lots are sorted, arranged in batches according to quality, and
auctioned off at sales, which are held three days a week. Even
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida, and Texas supply furs, but the
furs from the north are in general the most valuable. This is not true,
however, of muskrat, the best of which comes from the central and
eastern States.
The sales are conducted in the large hall of the exchange, where the
lots of furs are displayed in great piles. The skins are handled in the
raw state, having been merely removed from the carcass and dried before
shipment, with the result that the floor of the exchange is made
slippery by animal fats, and that the olfactory organs encounter smells
not to be matched in any zoo--or school--the blended fragrance of
raccoon, mink, opossum, muskrat, ermine, ringtail, house cat, wolf, red
fox, gray fox, cross fox, swift fox, silver fox, badger, otter, beaver,
lynx, marten, bear, wolverine, fisher--a great orchestra of odors, in
which the "air" is carried most competently, most unqualifiedly, by that
master virtuoso of mephitic redolence, the skunk.
I was told that about sixty-five per cent of all North American furs
pass through this exchange; also I received the rather surprising
information that the greatest number of skins furnished by this
continent comes from within a radius of five hundred miles of St.
Louis.
It was in this Fur Exchange that the first auction of government seal
skins ever held by the United States on its own territory, occurred last
year. Before that time it had been the custom of the government to send
Alaskan sealskins to Europe, where they were cured and dyed. Such of
these skins as were returned to the United States, after having
undergone curing and dyeing, came back under a duty of 20 per cent., or
more recently, by an increase in the tariff--30 per cent. And all but a
very few of the skins did come back. It was by action of Secretary of
Commerce Redfield that the seal sale was transferred from London to St.
Louis, and a member of the firm of Funsten Brothers & Co. informed me
that the ultimate result will be that seal coats now costing, say,
$1,200, may be bought for about $400 three years hence, when the seals
will no longer be protected according to the present law.
Some interesting information with regard to sealing was published in the
St. Louis "Republic" at the time of the sale. Quoting Mr. Philip B.
Fouke, president of the Funsten Co., the "Republic" says:
"Under the present policy of the Government the United States will get
the dyeing, curing, and manufacturing establishments from London,
Amsterdam, Nizhni Novgorod, and other great centers. The price of
sealskins will be reduced two-thirds to the wearer. Seals have been
protected for the past two years, and will be protected for three years
more, but during the period of protection it is necessary for the
Government hunters to kill some of the 'bachelor seals'--males, without
mates, who fight with other male seals for the possession of the
females, destroying the young, and causing much trouble. Also a certain
amount of seal meat must go to the natives for food.
"Each female produces but one pup a year, and each male demands from
twenty to one hundred females. Fights between males for the possession
of the females are fearful combats.
"In addition to protecting the seals on the Pribilof Islands, the United
States has entered into an agreement with Japan, Russia, and England,
that there shall be no sealing in the open seas for fifteen years. This
open sea, or pelagic sealing did great harm. Only the females leave the
land, where they can be protected, and go down to the open sea.
Consequently the poachers got many females, destroying the young seals
as well as the mothers, cutting off the source of supply, and leaving a
preponderance of 'bachelors,' or useless males."
What a chance for the writer of sex stories! Why dally with the human
race when seals are living such a lurid life? Here is a brand-new field:
The heroine a soft-eyed female with a hide like velvet; the hero a
dashing, splashing male. Sweet communions on the rocks at sunset, and
long swims side by side. But one night on the cliffs, beneath the moon
comes the blond beast of a bachelor, a seal absolutely unscrupulous and
of the lowest animal impulses. Then the climax--the Jack London stuff:
the fight on the edge of the cliff; the cry, the body hurtling to the
rocks below. And, of course, a happy ending--love on a cake of ice.
Old John Jacob Astor, founder of the Astor fortune, was a partner in the
American Fur Company of St. Louis of which Pierre Chouteau was
president. A letter written to Chouteau by Astor just before his
retirement from the fur business gives as the reason for his withdrawal
the following:
I very much fear beaver will not sell very well very soon unless
very fine. It appears that they make hats of silk in place of
beaver.
Beaver was at that time the most valuable skin, and had been used until
then for the making of tall hats; but the French were beginning to make
silk hats, and Astor believed that in that fact was presaged the
downfall of the beaver trade.
* * * * *
Club life in St. Louis is very highly developed. There are of course the
usual clubs which one expects to find in every large city: The St. Louis
Club, a solid old organization; the University Club, and a fine new
Country Club, large and well designed. Also there is a Racquet Club, an
agreeable and very live institution now holding the national
championship in double racquets, which is vested in the team of Davis
and Wear. The Davis of this pair is Dwight F. Davis, an exceedingly
active and able young man who, aside from many other interests, is a
member of the City Plan Commission, commissioner in charge of the very
excellent parks of St. Louis, and giver of the famous Davis Cup,
emblematic of the world's team tennis championship.
But the characteristic club note of St. Louis is struck by the very
small, exclusive clubs. One is the Florissant Valley Country Club, with
a pleasant, simple clubhouse and a very charming membership. But the
most famous little club of the city, and one of the most famous in the
United States, is the Log Cabin Club. I do not believe that in the
entire country there is another like it. The club is on the outskirts of
the city, and has its own golf course. Its house is an utterly
unostentatious frame building with a dining room containing a single
table at which all the members sit at meals together, like one large
family. The membership limit is twenty-five, and the list has never been
completely filled. There were twenty-one members, I was told, at the
time we were there, and besides being, perhaps, the most prominent men
in the city, these gentlemen are all intimates, so that the club has an
air of delightful informality which is hardly equaled in any other club
I know. The family spirit is further enhanced by the fact that no checks
are signed, the expense of operation being divided equally among the
members. Here originated the "Log Cabin game" of poker, which is now
known nationally in the most exalted poker circles. I should like to
explain this game to you, telling you all the hands, and how to bet on
them, but after an evening of practical instruction, I came away quite
baffled. Missouri is, you know, a poker State. Ordinary poker, as played
in the east, is a game too simple, too childlike, for the highly
specialized Missouri poker mind. I played poker twice in Missouri--that
is, I tried to play--but I might as well have tried to juggle with the
lightnings of the gods. No man has the least conception of that game
until he goes out to Missouri. There it is not merely a casual pastime;
it is a rite, a sacrament, a magnificent expression of a people. The Log
Cabin game is a thing of "kilters," skip-straights, around-the-corner
straights, and other complications. Three of a kind is very nearly
worthless. Throw it away after the draw if you like, pay a dollar and
get a brand-new hand.
But those are some simple little points to be picked up in an evening's
play, and a knowledge of the simple little points of such a game is
worse than worthless--it is expensive. To really learn the Log Cabin
game, you must give up your business, your dancing, and your home life,
move out to St. Louis, cultivate Log Cabin members (who are the high
priests of poker) and play with them until your family fortune has been
painlessly extracted. And however great the fortune, it is a small price
to pay for such adept instruction. When it is gone you will still fall
short of ordinary Missouri poker, and will be as a mere babe in the
hands of a Log Cabin member, but you will be absolutely sure of winning,
_anywhere outside the State_.
It seems logical that the city, which is beyond doubt the poker center
of the universe, should also have attained to eminence in drinks. It was
in St. Louis that two great drinks came into being. In the old days of
straight whisky, the term for three fingers of red liquor in a whisky
glass was a "ball." But there came from Austria a man named Enno
Sanders, who established a bottling works in St. Louis, and manufactured
seltzer. St. Louis liked the seltzer and presently it became the
practice to add a little of the bubbling water to the "ball." This
necessitated a taller glass, so men began to call for a "_high_ ball."
The weary traveler may be glad to know that the highball has not been
discontinued in St. Louis.
Another drink which originated in St. Louis is the gin rickey. Colonel
Rickey was born in Hannibal, Mo., of which town I shall write presently.
Later he moved to St. Louis and invented the famous rickey, which
immortalized his name--preserving it, as it were, in alcohol. The drink
was first served in a bar opposite the old Southern Hotel--a hotel
which, by the way, I regretted to see standing empty and deserted at the
time of my last visit, for, in its prime, it was a hotel among hotels.
I have tried to lead gradually, effectively to a climax. From clubs,
which are pleasant, I progressed to poker, which is pleasanter; from
poker I stepped ahead to highballs and gin rickeys. And now I am
prepared to reach my highest altitude. I intend to tell the very nicest
thing about St. Louis. And the nicest thing about St. Louis is the
nicest thing that there can be about a place.
It discounts primitive street cars, an ill-set railway station, and an
unfinished bridge. It sinks the parks, the botanical gardens, the art
museum into comparative oblivion. Small wonder that St. Louis seems to
ignore her minor weaknesses when she excels in this one thing--as she
must know she does.
The nicest thing about St. Louis is St. Louis girls.
In the first place, fashionable young women in St. Louis are quite as
gratifying to the eye as women anywhere. In the second place, they have
unusual poise. This latter quality is very striking, and it springs, I
fancy, from the town's conservatism and solidity. The young girls and
young men of the St. Louis social group have grown up together, as have
their parents and grandparents before them. They give one the feeling
that they are somehow rooted to the place, as no New Yorker is rooted to
New York. The social fabric of St. Louis changes little. The old
families live in the houses they have always lived in, instead of moving
from apartment to apartment every year or two. One does not feel the
nervous tug of social and financial straining, of that eternal
overreaching which one senses always in New York.
One day at luncheon I found myself between two very lovely
creatures--neither of them over twenty-two or twenty-three; both of them
endowed with the aplomb of older, more experienced, women--who endeared
themselves to me by talking critically about the works of Meredith--and
Joseph Conrad--and Leonard Merrick. Fancy that! Fancy their being pretty
girls yet having worth-while things to say--and about those three men!
And when the conversation drifted away from books to the topic which my
companion and I call "life stuff," and when I found them adept also in
that field, my appreciation of St. Louis became boundless.
It just occurs to me that, in publishing the fact that St. Louis girls
have brains I may have unintentionally done them an unkindness.
Once I asked a young English bachelor to my house for a week-end.
"I want you to come this week," I said, "because the prettiest girl I
know will be there."
"Delighted," he replied.
"She's a most unusual girl," I went on, "for, besides being a dream of
loveliness, she's clever."
"Oh," he said, "if she's clever, let me come some other time. I don't
like 'em clever. I like 'em pretty and stupid."