You may have heard of a lot of the other folks in our December history feature ("100 People Who Shaped St. Louis"), but you may not have heard of these
By Martha K. Baker
Rebecca Naylor Hazard
She came from pioneer stock, and her schooling ended at age 14, but Rebecca Naylor Hazard was formed by her love of books and her Methodist stand for what was right. At 18, she married William T. Hazard (his father was a U.S. representative from Rhode Island), and in 1850, they settled out in the country near Kirkwood. For the next six decades, she fought for the poor, the disenfranchised, the enslaved and the lost. She started with neglected and homeless city girls, establishing the Girls’ Industrial Home to keep them from a life of prostitution. When the Civil War erupted, she organized the Union Aid Society to care for sick and wounded soldiers. For ex-slaves, mostly women and children huddled—and dying—at the Missouri Hotel under armed guard, she raised funds for the Union League.
Not all her causes were grim: She co-founded the School of Design, which later merged into the Woman’s Exchange, and she helped form the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri. In 1878, she was elected president of the national suffrage association.
For 20 years, Hazard held salons in her Kirkwood home, 401 Clark, to discuss Dante, Homer and Hegel, among others. Her obituary described her as a writer, a scholar and a “lover of literary pursuits.”
But her obituary was far too short.
Edna and Martha Gellhorn
An 8-year-old girl stands among 7,000, silent, yellow-sashed women at the St. Louis Coliseum. They’ve been marshaled by her mother, Edna Fischel Gellhorn, to shame delegates to the 1916 Democratic convention into including women’s suffrage on the platform.
Martha and her mother were both beautiful: Edna more formally so, with a braided coronet atop her regal head. Martha’s “quiet, cool body” seduced men freely—even Ernest Hemingway, her first husband, whom she declared “a ghastly lover.” (Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson—also from St. Louis—was more distressed by his infidelity.)
Both of the Gellhorn women pushed aside the safe constraints of convention, preferring the risk of a life lived with a social conscience. Edna campaigned for potable water and pure milk, helped found John Burroughs School and the League of Women Voters and served on the Inter-Racial Committee and the Slum Clearance Commission. At 90, she regretted not joining King’s March on Washington when she was 85. Martha, a brilliant and gutsy war correspondent, covered the Spanish Civil War, sneaked onto the beaches of Normandy as the first woman witness, was forever changed after seeing the liberation of Dachau and inveighed against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. She wrote 11 books, a travel memoir and hundreds of witty, pensive letters before cancer and blindness convinced her to kill herself at 89.
In countless, relentless ways, Edna Gellhorn had pushed St. Louis—and her daughter—to be better. Martha called her mother “the true north of my life,” but said St. Louis made her feel “burned alive.”
The Mulhall Family
Both cattle baron and impresario, Zack Mulhall roped his 10 children into Col. Zack Mulhall’s Wild West Show, which he started as a way to entertain St. Louis clients. Born here in 1845, he was educated at Christian Brothers College; his St. Louis bride, Mary Agnes, was convent-trained—yet put up with his teenage mistress, who added two children to Mary Agnes’ eight. The Mulhalls toured the country but came back to wow the crowd at the 1904 World’s Fair. Daughter Lucille was the undisputed star of the show. A daring horsewoman, she could shoot a coyote at 500 yards and at 18, she broke the men’s roping record by tying three steers in 3 minutes and 36 seconds. (She could also play Chopin, quote Browning and make mayonnaise.) Theodore Roosevelt invited her and Zack to ride as vanguard for the 1901 inaugural parade, and the Cherokee Kid, a.k.a. Will Rogers, pronounced her “the world’s first cowgirl.” She was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame when it opened in 1975.
The Potters
At the turn of the 20th century, a group of young women, recent graduates of Central High School, gathered to uphold each other’s commitment to art. This sort of thing was simply not done, not among white, middle-class, young women of means who should be devoting themselves to “good works” until the right man came along. But for The Potters, as the five called themselves, art—working, not dabbling—mattered most. Two sisters, Williamina and Grace Parrish, took the photographs for the group’s magazine, The Potter’s Wheel. Vine Colby and Celia Harris wrote, sculptor Caroline Risque designed, and more young women soon joined, among them the poet Sara Teasdale.
The women met each Friday to produce the monthly magazine, showcasing Risque’s Celtic border designs, Sombart’s shimmering design for a silk scarf, Grace Parrish’s hand-tooled and hand-bound book cover, Will Parrish’s dragonfly monogram. They gave each other solid encouragement and blunt criticism, nothing ladylike about it. And while they were not well received by what one of their friends described as the “the rich nobodies,” they sustained each other’s creative pursuits for the rest of their lives.
E. Simms Campbell
You may not know his name, but if you flipped through your dad’s Esquire or Playboy back in the pinup-girl era, you’ll remember his style. E. Simms Campbell drew sylphs in harems lorded over by fat pashas, fur-draped young misses cooing at sugar daddies and, famously, a curvaceous bride holding a phone. “It’s the groom,” she says to her bridesmaid. “Should he be calling long-distance?”
Campbell, unlike many cartoonists of his time, came up with both gag and graphic. Born in St. Louis in 1908, he was smart enough to enter the University of Chicago at 16, but he was told to forget about being a commercial artist for one simple reason: He was black.
It didn’t stop him. Campbell’s work appeared in The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, at a time of screaming segregation, a time when “white” publications were often boycotted if blacks were on the masthead.
He was once asked, “How do race-hating whites feel when they discover that the creator of these sensuous half-naked girls is colored?”
“Who gives a damn?” he replied. “They get over it.”
Esquire was the first to hire Campbell; his work appeared in every issue from 1933 to 1958, and he is credited with creating “Esky,” the dapper white dude who became the magazine’s “face.”
But not its pen.
