It’s been just over 30 years since Stephen Walker’s book Lemp: The Haunting History came out, helping to make the ill-fated family a household name in St. Louis. In many ways, our understanding of the Lemps is still indebted to his book, and lines of his fans still form when Walker hosts a book signing. I thought it would be interesting to talk to Walker and look back on how the book came to be.
“I’m a sucker for a good ghost story,” Walker tells me, as we talked over the phone last Sunday. “I came for the ghosts, and I stayed for the history.”
But when Walker started to get to know the family on a personal level, he realized they were becoming more interesting for what they were “before they were ghosts.”
“You can research ghosts all day long and not find any,” Walker jokes. “But you can go down to the library and find evidence of their lives. History only gets better as it gets older. There’s that thrill of the chase, digging through the dustbin of history and literally finding dust-covered documents. I want [the Lemps] to be remembered for who they were, but I’m not against the ghost stories.”
Walker didn’t set out to write his first book. The impetus began with an innocent trip to the Central Library, where he asked to check out a book on the brewing family after visiting the Lemp Mansion and talking to the owner, Dick Pointer.
“The librarian gave me a quizzical look,” Walker says. He checked the card catalog and then sent me down the hall to the History and Genealogy department. I found some photos, newspaper clippings, and a map. It was exciting.”
The Central Library also has an original copy of the auction catalog when the Lemps sold the brewery after its closure in the early years of Prohibition. Inspired by these finds, Walker then began to hunt down other newspaper articles, long before any of these sources were digitized, let alone on the internet. He also says that collectors of Lemp memorabilia offered him considerable help; Walker says he still owes them a debt of gratitude. They even gave him valuable Lemp-related objects that, as a young man, he could never have afforded to buy at the time. Perhaps the most memorable incident in his research came when Walker visited the St. Louis Coroner’s Office to see the original reports of the four Lemp family member’s suicide.
“I went down there, and asked if I could see the files on the Lemp suicides,” he says. “The guy was wonderful. He let me in and showed me the Lemp file. Police reports, witness statements, etc. He tells me, ‘I’m going to go eat. You can copy anything in there; here’s the copy machine.’ I sat down. The first one I opened was Charles. Right on top was his original suicide note. It was the most stunning moment in all my research. I really believe since 1949 no one had seen it in person except me,” Walker remembers.
Walker sat down in his apartment and spread out his documents chronologically on the floor, with articles on Adam Lemp, the founder, on the left; sources on his son, William Sr. following; then items on the iconic brewery buildings; and finally, a surprising amount about Billy Lemp and his acrimonious divorce from Lilian Lemp, the Lavender Lady.
“The chronology sort of took care of itself,” Walker says. “I could see chapter breaks forming. The narrative sort of formed itself. I saw the divorce becoming its own chapter because it’s so interesting to read today. There’s a lot of information because there were four newspapers [in St. Louis covering the trial] at the time.”
After the Lemp Brewery closed, Walker continued with the story of the Lemps, feeling like the children of William Lemp Sr. deserved to have their stories told. Elsa, the only woman in the family, received her own section, for example. Also, sons such as Louis, whose story at the time was largely obscured from history, also had a short biography. Walker included these sidebars to “give readers a break” from the larger narrative.
But Edwin, the last son to die, in 1970, has his own chapter due to a large amount of information Walker found about the reclusive bachelor who lived on the edge of Kirkwood overlooking the Meramec River. Walker remembers interviewing one of Edwin’s domestic staff in the 1980s:
“I met one of his caretakers who must have been in his 80s, Richard Kniely, the caretaker at Cragwold,” Walker says. “He gave me so much information. He was a contemporary. I started high school the year Edwin died.”
Waxing philosophical three decades after the first edition of his book came out, Walker says: “I liken the Lemp saga to the story of the Titanic. It’s far enough to be history, but some of its survivors died just a few years ago. It’s the same thing with the Lemps. It’s far enough ago, but there are a lot of places they impacted that are still here. People think that history is dry, but this shows otherwise.”
Walker continues to research the family, and he, David Mullgardt (another researcher of the family), and I occasionally meet to talk about our recent discoveries in the study of the Lemps. In fact, Walker recently uncovered a photograph of Billy Lemp only a few years before the brewer’s suicide. But one question, which I have also wondered about, continues to bother Walker, even after all these decades of studying the Lemps.
“Why did Billy emerge as the leader [after his father William Sr.’s suicide]?” he wonders. “I’d like to interview Charles, Edwin, and Louis and ask why they didn’t jump in and do it. Were there personal reasons? I’d like to have been in the room when that happened.”
Of course, Billy’s attempts to operate the Lemp Brewery through Prohibition failed, and the grand family enterprise was sold at auction. And that is what is most important for Walker, to see the Lemps as people who made mistakes.
“I try to promote them as real human beings with flaws with less of the ghost aspect,” he says. “The good things they did. They deserve to be remembered for more than their suicides. Let’s remember their contributions to their family, their community, and their adopted nation as a whole.”
Lemp: The Haunting History by Stephen Walker is available for purchase in the Lemp Mansion gift shop and on amazon.com.
