Seated, the paterfamilias, Dr. Hugo Maximilian von Starkloff. At left, his son, Dr. Max C. Starkloff, who dropped the aristocratic “von”; at right, Max’s daughter, Adele Starkloff O’Madigan. The boys are her sons: from left to right, Max; then on Hugo's lap, Carl; then Daniel (photo courtesy of Christian Saller).
When Dr. Hugo von Starkloff returned to his native Germany as consul, he landed in the middle of the cholera panic and sprang into action, setting up sanitary measures that kept the epidemic from reaching steamers bound for the United States.
Twenty-five years later, his son Maximilian was St. Louis Health Commissioner during our battle with influenza, and his sanitary measures gave St. Louis the lowest death toll of any city its size in the nation.
Crisis didn’t faze the Starkloff men. Hugo’s grandfather died serving under Napoleon in the Russian campaign. Hugo left his father’s barony to come to the United States in 1852, crossing Lake Erie on the Griffith until it burned to the water’s edge, and he was picked up by a passing steamer. During the Civil War, he cared for blood-drenched soldiers, and afterward founded an orthopedic institute at Jefferson Barracks. Max treated thousands of patients injured working on railroads and in iron works and steel plants; after his death, City Hospital—opened to care for anyone who couldn’t afford a private hospital—was renamed in his honor.
“Another detail about Max C. Starkloff's career in public medicine is his deep interest in venereal disease—its eradication, that is,” notes his great-great-grandson Christian Saller. “He refused to spare polite company an account of the different ‘classes’ of prostitutes and the manner in which each plied its trade. According to his son Gene, he would not be ‘shushed’ into silence by pained looks or tactful attempts to change the subject. He wanted to regulate and control prostitution as a menace to public health, reasoning that simply criminalizing it did nothing to stop it or prevent the spread of illness.”
Saller says he grew up hearing colorful stories about Max C. “He was a puzzling man, deeply committed to the public weal, eschewing political popularity and personal advantage in pursuit of public health, but an autocratic bastard to live with. A genuine tough guy, but also very compassionate and dedicated in his work. He had a brother, Emil Arthur, who was an old-time conman and bunco steerer, traveling the land and selling people the Brooklyn Bridge and shares in nonexistent mines. Even as a prominent official, Max C. delighted in periodic visits from this brother—as long as federal authorities were not on his tail, as they often were. He strongly disapproved of his brother’s larcenous lifestyle but admired his intellect. I guess if he liked you, he liked you.”
After digging through old photo albums, Saller emails: “I have an old photo of Emil and Max C. with little (half) sisters Irma and Elsa, probably made in the 1880s, before Emil's complete fall from grace. Everyone is dolled up and looking appropriately serious. Emil has a steely gaze that positively leaps out of the photo. He was an impressive physical specimen and spent a stint in an Atlanta jail studying the Eureka violin method and Spanish. My research shows that he was a much-married Romeo, to put it politely. I obtained his prison dossier, which was very illuminating. Some of the cons he practiced with various confederates would never work today, which makes them seem sort of quaint and harmless, which they were not. He fleeced some British royalty around 1910 before fleeing to Europe, where he lived large and hid out for a couple of years. Hugo died in 1914 and had written his oldest child off completely, actually leaving him a penny in his will to make the point. I don't know if Emil collected the penny, but I would not be surprised.”
As for his more respectable brother, Reedy’s Mirror praised “Dr. Max” for describing himself as “a plain American” and dropping the “von” of the German aristocracy. He was, the magazine said, “almost too well known in St. Louis to merit any kind of detailed statement. Shall we paint the lily?” But the best sense of him comes from a letter he wrote to his daughter in 1892: “Whenever you study, my darling child, keep your mind exclusively at your studies and do not think of anything else; but when you close your books, then let your thoughts wander… Always consider yourself as good as any other child, but never any better than the poorest of them.”
Another of Hugo’s children, his daughter Irma, charmed the popular novelist Booth Tarkington, but the Starkloffs opposed the match. Instead she married Edgar Rombauer, great-grandson of Gustave Koerner—a Belleville abolitionist, statesman, and diplomat who was a confidant of Abraham Lincoln. A graduate of Washington University School of Law, Edgar had a fine but oversensitive mind. He loved the quiet of home life and it was often he who did the cooking; she was, her family said, a terrible cook. She learned just enough to write—when she needed both money and diversion after Edgar’s suicide—The Joy of Cooking, a lighthearted compendium with the audacity to bill itself as the cookbook of record. Soon, the claim was true. Her daughter, Marion (who married a Wash.U. architecture grad), did silhouette illustrations and tested recipes for future revisions, enlisting her son, Ethan, for the 1997 edition.
And the Max Starkloff current St. Louisans know best? He began adult life with the same vigorous athleticism and good looks as “Dr. Max”—then, at 21, crashed his 1959 Austin-Healey Sprite and woke up quadriplegic. He spent many years living alongside doddering old men in a nursing home. But there he founded Paraquad—one of the first 10 independent living centers in the nation to receive federal funding—with his future wife, physical therapist Colleen Kelly. They fought bureaucratic bias to adopt three children, and later had to grieve the tragic hit-and-run death of their daughter Emily just as she was beginning studies to become, in the family tradition, an ICU nurse.
Three presidents sought Max’s advice, and people all over the world have benefited from his advocacy. Because of the Starkloffs’ efforts, St. Louis’ buses were the first in the nation to have wheelchair lifts, and our city is far easier to navigate, with curb cuts, reserved parking spaces, and accessibility on MetroLink and at destinations like Busch Stadium and (after a lawsuit) the Saint Louis Zoo. Colleen continues their work at the Starkloff Disability Institute, and six grandchildren inherited his legacy—plus all those honors and plaques there’s no need to mention. We’d be repainting the lily.
➡ Tell us your experiences with this family, or tell us about your own favorite dynasty. Who'd we miss? Add stories, interconnections, and examples to our St. Louis Family Histories by filling out this form.
