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Harry Caray
Lafayette Square
“I remember it as a tough neighborhood, but the people who lived there—mostly Italians, Irish, and Syrians—were proud and hard-working, and they kept the neighborhood meticulously clean. Still, compared to our neighborhood, The Hill (the tough Italian area where Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola grew up) was Beverly Hills,” recalled Harry Caray, the flamboyant Cardinals and Cubs sportscaster, in his memoir Holy Cow. “My first job was selling newspapers in the afternoon. This is when I was 8, 9, 10 years old. I started at the corner of 18th and Chouteau, a wiry little kid selling the evening Post-Dispatch to the workers who were getting off the day shift at the International Shoe Factory… I was always shouting headlines, enticing those workers with stories about cops and robbers, about politicians and businessmen, about movie stars and ballplayers. Looking back on it now, I have to wonder if that isn’t where I got my start in broadcasting.”
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William S. Burroughs
Central West End
The real-estate listing boasts of cathedral ceilings, a Spanish tile roof, and mahogany paneling. It also mentions that the house is the childhood home of William S. Burroughs. For those of a sensitive disposition who’ve read Naked Lunch, this might not be a selling point; moreover, Burroughs apparently didn’t have much fun in the house. He was a shy, nervous kid who was so weird, he got thrown out of one neighbor’s house for looking like “a sheep-killing dog.” He was afraid to sleep, because in his dreams, “a supernatural horror was always on the point of taking shape.” It was in this house that Burroughs, at age 8, wrote an essay titled “The Autobiography of a Wolf.” The grown-ups laughed at him. “You mean biography of a wolf?” No, Burroughs countered, I did not make a mistake. “I mean autobiography of a wolf,” he repeated years later, “and still do.”
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Chuck Berry
The Greater Ville
Chuck Berry bought this three-room brick shotgun house in 1950. Eight years later, he and his wife, Themetta, were still living here—even after he’d made a name for himself and a heap of cash recording “Maybellene” and “Johnny B. Goode.” Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the house is just a few blocks south of Berry’s childhood home. He grew up hearing his father’s fine baritone accompany his mother in Antioch Baptist Church’s gospel hymns. One of Berry’s sisters sang opera; another played classical piano so relentlessly, he’d later write “Roll Over Beethoven” in revenge. Classes at Simmons Colored School bored him, but he loved his years at Sumner High School: At 15, he sang “Confessin’ the Blues” onstage and knew, right then, what he wanted to do forever.
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Vincent Price
Clayton
Though Marguerite Price instructed architects that her new house had to be American, she appalled them—and her youngest son, Vincent—with her faux-Asian decor. A ghastly sunroom included pea-green walls, black enameled bamboo furniture, and a faux-Chinese rug that “looked like a misshapen tweed coat.” In another room was “an etching of three of the saddest cows ever seen, grazing in abject postures in a sepia valley.” But Price said his parents’ horrible taste sparked his interest in art, including theater. He and his friend Henry took turns writing, acting, and staging plays in each other’s living rooms, using sheets for curtains and charging two pins for admittance.
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Phyllis Diller
Webster Groves
In the spring of 1962, Phyllis Diller paid $20,000 cash for an 11-room house in Webster Groves. After a series of delays, she finally got the keys—and had just two days to furnish her new home before heading off to New York to perform. Says Diller, “You know what I did? I went straight down to Goodwill and bought everything I could. It was the smartest thing I ever did. They were just breaking up the old rich, rich, rich castle-like homes on the park. The new young people didn’t want that beautiful old furniture. I wanted it. To this day, my favorite room, my loggia, here in my 22-room house [in Brentwood, Calif.] has that furniture from Goodwill in St. Louis. Isn’t that wonderful?”
UPDATE: Diller recently said this when SLM contributing editor Christy Marshall asked her how she would describe St. Louis: "As a wonderful town, a friendly town, a town with a great deal of talent, a town with lovely people, and a wonderful place to raise children"
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Miles Davis
East St. Louis
His first memory, at age 3, was “a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit.” Somehow, that seems appropriate to the fiery genius whose 1959 album, Kind of Blue, has been called the greatest jazz record of all time. “Little Doc Davis” spent his earliest years at 15th Street and Broadway in East St. Louis, Ill., in three rooms behind his father’s dental practice. In 1937, when Davis was 11, the family moved to a white 13-room house with red awnings at 17th Street and Kansas Avenue. It was in this house, at age 12, that Davis decided music was the most important thing in his life. He’d leave the radio on all night, sometimes not falling asleep until dawn broke. By his midteens, he spent hours in the basement perfecting his trumpet notes or holding rehearsals for an 18-piece dance band whose members he paid to show up. This summer, scrap-metal thieves vandalized the house; there’s now talk of nominating it to the National Register of Historic Places or making it an Illinois state historic site to save it.
Photographs by Jennifer Silverberg
Photographs by Jennifer Silverberg
