Alise O'Brien
Evelyn Newman slips on her glasses and unfolds a yellowed piece of paper. Her finest piece of furniture, a painted corner cabinet (circa 1760), stands against the wall behind her. She reads a letter from Lady Dorothy Quincy Piggott of Closeburn Castle, Thornhill, Scotland, to the antique dealer who purchased the piece before reselling it to Mrs. Newman and her husband, Eric. The letter politely acknowledges the receipt of £490.
"It's so fun," Mrs. Newman exclaims, her voice rising a few octaves. "Then my husband, who is a great follower-upper of things, writes to Lady Piggott: 'My wife and I are the owners of the lovely corner cupboard which we acquired from Muirhead Moffat. It fits beautifully into our living room, having just arrived from Glasgow. If you ever come to St. Louis, we would be delighted to have you come see it"— Mrs. Newman bursts out laughing—"in its new home. We would like to know a little more about the corner cupboard, and I presume you know the details as to its background. Any information you might have,' blah, blah, blah. 'Mr. Moffat was kind enough to remove the Formica from the folding shelf.'
"That probably got her. She probably didn't like that," says Mrs. Newman. "They used it as a bar, apparently. Anyway, we never heard from Lady Piggott."
Nevertheless, they have the story to gleefully recount. In fact, throughout the Newmans' home, one unusual item after another elicits amusing anecdotes of how, when, and where it was found.
"We've been to a lot of places, and we've brought a lot of stuff back," Mrs. Newman says. "There are so many things we have that I love." She points out the paddle from New Guinea, tole clock peddler from Amsterdam, leather wig box from China, fabrics from assorted cities that she had made into pillows, and box bought in 1987 from a Bedouin woman in Timbuktu. "This is one of our prized possessions," Mr. Newman says. "These are camel-skin tassels. This woman tied this box on the side of a camel, and it had all her little jewels and beads and hair wiggles and all that. After a long negotiation, we bought it from her. That was a lot of fun. We've got stuff from everywhere in the world ... We've been just so lucky to be able to get to countries where people are now shooting each other."
The Newmans are renowned collectors and philanthropists. Mr. Newman, an eminent numismatic scholar, began collecting coins when he was a child, authored Early Paper Money of America (now in its fifth edition), and runs the Newman Money Museum, located in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the Washington University campus. He also collects antique atlases, ephemera of old St. Louis businesses, old Mississippi River prints, and stereoscopic views (photography where two images converge into one). "Everything devoted to art brings out the best in people," Mr. Newman says quietly.
Mrs. Newman is well recognized around town as the creator of the Greater St. Louis Book Fair, the Arts and Education Council's CAMELOT (an acronym for Cultural Auction of Many Extraordinary Lots of Treasure), the Saint Louis Symphony's Gypsy Caravan, the Scholarship Foundation's ScholarShop, Faust Park's Butterfly House, Missouri Botanical Garden's Little Shop Around the Corner, and the gift shops in both the Missouri History Museum and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Of all her ventures, her favorite is the Book Fair, started in 1949. "I had two children, and in those days, there was a lot of help in the kitchen," she says. "So I decided I had to do something, and I asked friends to give me their extra books." She collected the volumes in her basement; the fair was held at Temple Israel on Washington Avenue before moving onto the Westroads Stix, Baer & Fuller (now Dillards) parking lot (now part of the Galleria) and then to West County Famous-Barr (now Macy's).
But Mrs. Newman caught the collecting bug while she was shopping for yet another of her ventures, the Bird in the Hand shop, first located in the Clayton Famous-Barr. She pulls out a picture of herself at the 1964 opening. "We save everything in this house," she says with a sigh.
She proposed the shop to Stanley Goodman, then the department store's erudite president. Although he hated the name, he bought the concept and gave her a budget. Then she zipped off to England to shop.
"That is what put me in the whole antique-collecting business," she says. "The most fun I ever had at Famous-Barr is when I advertised for a castle or manor house in The London Telegraph. The object was to buy the whole house, all of its contents, bring it back, and put it up on the third floor of Famous-Barr as a restoration of the house."
The Newmans crossed the pond to investigate the three responses they received. The first two were disappointing, but then there was the third, a 15th-century house in Northern Ireland. The mother lode.
"The host immediately showed us everything," Mrs. Newman says. "The rooms were stark, but filled with the most incredible stuff you have ever seen." The booty included rows of chests with brass escutcheons, a room of miniatures, and "a lovely library with tons of books. The kitchen was 150 feet from the dining room. Even though it was a very simple place, it was a very big place. In the kitchen, there were stacked-up boxes filled with silver. I pulled some out, and it was Irish silver—very fine and very heavy. I thought, 'Oh, my God, this is unbelievable!' The man was land-poor, and he needed to sell this stuff."
Mrs. Newman ended up inventorying the entire house. "I think we offered what amounted to about $100,000," she says. "We negotiated it for 2 1/2 years, then Lee Abraham [then her boss at Famous] said, 'I think you better talk to him to see if he sold off any of this stuff.' Sure enough, he had gotten rid of the Irish silver. We made another offer and then backed away from the deal. But that was the most fun I ever had in my life. That really started my interest in antiques."
And the thrill of the hunt. "I started collecting Huntley & Palmers biscuit boxes," she says. "They are so interesting because you can see all the shapes [of tins] they made. They are very collectible and hard to find. And everywhere I went, I would look for them."
She has a number of them, carefully placed in one of the house's many, many bookcases. She scans the room. "Books, books, books. We can't possibly move." That isn't the only reason.
Mr. Newman's father, a successful St. Louis surgeon, paid $9,000 for the lotand- a-half in Clayton and $26,000 to have their three-story brick house built. At the time, Mr. Newman was 10 years old.
He never moved. He just turned 98.
One fateful night, he strolled across the street to go to a party, and there he spied Evelyn Edison, then 18, wearing a necklace of coins. Like a bear to honey, the young numismatist (nine years her senior) immediately made her acquaintance—and 11 months later, made her his wife. She moved into the house—and lived there with Mr. Newman, Dr. Newman, and the household staff. (The senior Mrs. Newman was deceased.)
"It was full of furniture his mother and father had purchased when they went to Europe on their honeymoon," Mrs. Newman says. "It was heavy furniture, some of it Swiss, some of it German. I started moving furniture around. Quickly. Well, maybe not so quickly."
In 1939, Evelyn Newman's mother had employed legendary designers Ruby Ross Wood and Billy Baldwin to help her design her new house at 4 Dromara in Ladue. In 970, Mrs. Newman summoned Sister Parish and Albert Hadley from New York to redo the décor of her husband's childhood home.
"What do I find up in my attic?" she asks, laughing as she picks up a sample of a fabric on a five-day loan from Sister Parish's firm, Parish-Hadley. (Suspect they aren't looking for it anymore. They sent it in 1972.) The decorator used he hand-quilted fabric for a tablecloth that is still in the study.
"Sister Parish was wonderful," Mrs. Newman recalls. "She was incredible. She was very regal, a grand dame, and very opinionated. Those people are very actful. They don't say it's hideous. But I don't really remember what she said. Sister Parish was the first person who did an overhaul."
The next designer the Newmans hired was Tom Britt, who, like Sister Parish, had worked for the couple's daughter, Linda, in New York. "The house needed some 'up' stuff," Mrs. Newman says.
"I did certain things with their house, but a great deal of it was leaving what Parish-Hadley had done and molding what I did with what they had done," Mr. Britt says. "In other words, we didn't dump everything and start in from scratch. It looked good, and it was right for them. I also wanted to keep it very young- and fresh-looking, because they are the kind of people who do not have an age. When they were in their teens, they didn't have an age. They are timeless people."
Sister Parish had chosen Brunschwig & Fils' Tree of Life fabric for the living room and den; Mr. Britt kept it, but in the dining room, he put up a new wallcovering and added trim to the drapes. He had the walls in the breakfast room papered in red and replaced the carpet on the stairs with a pattern that perfectly matches the vinyl wallpaper Sister Parish had picked decades before.
"We simply rearranged, reupholstered, changed some fabrics, changed some rugs, added wallpaper," Mr. Britt says. "They have an awfully nice house, don't you think?"
But when the Newmans are queried, the answers inevitably meander back to the collections. "We live in a collectors' house," Mrs. Newman says.
Take the story about the engraving of downtown St. Louis in 1845—a print Mrs. Newman first spied in the home of Arthur Ziern, a local antique dealer.
"Of course, he wouldn't sell it to her because he knew how good it was," Mr. Newman says. "Then he gave it to his lawyer, because his lawyer wanted to charge him money, and Mr. Ziern wanted to give his lawyer something nice and not pay him anything."
The lawyer died and left it to his son. Mr. Newman didn't relent, but the son, a philatelist, wanted a rare American postage stamp in choice condition in exchange. "So I went to another friend of mine who collected stamps and said, 'Can't we get him this postage stamp?'" Mr. Newman says. "So he sent me one, and it was not in good enough condition. The cancellation wasn't this way or that way. I had to submit eight different examples, and finally one satisfied him. And he exchanged the postage stamp for this."
It took nearly seven years.
"People who collect things are kind of nutty," Mr. Newman says. "You have to be nutty to go through all this."
But then he smiles with pride at his treasure—just one of many in this collectors' cache house.
