I was born on August 25 1927, at home at 4635 Virginia in St. Louis Missouri.
My mother was born as Norma Schmering on September 27, 1893 at 2715 Winnebago, St. Louis, Missouri. I, and everyone else, knew my mother as Pearl. My most vivid recollection of that time, is the death of my mother who died in a doctors office at 4535 Virginia on March 21 1938 when I was 10 years old. She had taken me with her to the doctors office to have her throat lanced for a strep (streptococcus) throat infection. I was told later, that when the doctor lanced the throat, the poison went directly to her heart. I was setting in the outer office when the fireman brought their Pulmotor equipment into the office to, I assume now, try to get her breathing again. I just sat there not knowing what was going on until my grandmother Schmering came to get me to take me home. My parents were separated at the time, so my grandmother called my father.
My mother was buried in the Schmering burial plot, along side of her mother and father, in the Sunset Cemetery in St. Louis County. Her Death Certificate . A photo below shows my mother and father at the wedding of my father’s sister Edna, to Mr. Robert Hipp.
My father was born as Raymond Boehmer on January 5, 1900 at 1635 N. 19th St, in St. Louis, Missouri. I knew him as Arthur Herman, most people knew him as Slim.
My father with my mother, his sister Edna and his brother-law, Robert Hipp. He is shown with his three boys, with his two sisters and his mother and by himself. My Father died on Feb. 16 1971 due to a stroke.
I had two brothers, Roland who was five years older, and Arthur who is two years younger. He had a wife named Rose.
My brother Roland and my brother Arthur at the wedding of Rolands son, John. Below are the three Boehmer boys.
Roland died in June 1985. His grave at the Veterans Cemetery, Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis County.
My brother Arthur now lives in Woodstock Illinois in the summer and Jacksonville Florida in the winter.
Arthur is a retired United Airlines captain.
My earliest recollections as a child, are of my Grandmother and Grandfather Schmering. They lived in St. Louis). This house, which was later purchased by my father, was on the corner of a very busy street. It had a concrete back yard (unusual in those days) and an finished attic reached by a stairs in the kitchen. It also had a large basement with a fruit cellar (to store fruit and vegetables), and a coal bin (a room to store the coal used to heat the house). Grandfather Schmering was a conductor on the streetcar that ran on Broadway in front of his home. The conductor was the man who collector the fare (5 cents) from the passengers . This could not have been a high paying job but Ben Schmering accumulated four houses before he died, the single family home on Broadway, the two family flat on Virginia where I was born, a four family flat ( more about this house later), and a two family flat .
My aunts told me in later years that my father could not get along with his mother-in-law, my grandmother, who moved into the upper flat of the two family flat at 4635 Virginia, which she owned, after my grandfather died in 1936. I never talked to my father about this subject. My grandmother liked her beer, she was a real German, and I can remember going across the street to a saloon with a small bucket (pail) to get beer for her. I went to grade school at Scruggs School on Grand Ave., until my mother died.
At that time my father gathered up the kids and moved to North St. Louis to a house that I do not remember, and to a school I do not remember. Also my grandmother, Anna Boehmer, came to live with us to raise us kids. I have many memories of grandma Boehmer. She insisted that we follow the Catholic religion of my mother and made us go to church every Sunday, sometimes we just took a walk or a streetcar ride. There was one statement that she made that has stuck with me - she predicted that Roland would be the only one who would leave town, Babe (Art was known to all as Babe until in his thirties) and me would stay in St. Louis.
My brother Roland was an interesting person, he was very intelligent but had very little education, he did not finish grade school. I was told that he initially attended a Catholic grade school and the nuns made him write right handed in spite of the fact that he was left handed. I do not know if this is true but it was a fact that Roland hated school and thus did not do well. (His son John has a similar problem, he only liked one class, drawing, and would not attend any other class). They used to tell me in school that I was catching up to Roland because he was held back so much. Roland finally quit school and went to work with my father delivering parcels for a department store, Famous-Barr.
In those days people sometimes did not carry home their purchase, no matter how small, and the company delivered them to the home free of charge. My father (and my uncle Robert Hipp) delivered these parcels for many years. Roland, at one time, was the person who looked at the address on the parcel and determined which of the many routes covered that address. This involved knowing all of the streets in St. Louis and where a specific address was and which route covered that address. He had to be smart to have that capability. Therefore a sad case, intelligent but uneducated.
My father married Brownie Mae Courtney on Thanksgiving day 1939. Brownie, my stepmother, worked at Kresge (now K-Mart) in downtown St. Louis. Brownie worked full time. So grandmother Boehmer still lived with us and raised the three boys.
We moved back to south St. Louis about 1940 and moved. My father tried to buy this house several times but the owner would never sell. I went back to Scruggs School and graduated in January 1941 ( I went back for the 40th reunion in 1981). I also met a girl who lived at 4124 Louisiana named Mary Wilson.
Roland went into the Navy in 1941 where he served in submarines. He told us that he was on the Spearfish. He also told us that he became so frightened one time during an attack that all of his hair fell out and he was subsequently transferred to a submarine tender.
One of my activities during my youth was in the Sea Scouts a branch of the Boy Scouts. We had a sailboat and a whaleboat in the ship (they called the group a ship instead of a troop) which we maintained in the winter (sand and paint the bottom and decks) and sail in the summer on Alton Lake north of St. Louis. Alton Lake was that part of the Mississippi River behind the Alton Dam at Alton Ill. We learned to sail the X Boat, a sailboat about 15 feet long, and spent a whole week one summer on the river. We always sailed up river so that if the wind died down we could drift down to our harbor. . A photo of me in our Whaleboat is below.
I worked at a bowling alley one summer, setting pins including small pins called duckpins. We set the pins by hand and set several alleys (2 or 3), and sometimes a bowler would not wait until his first ball came back and would throw a different ball down the alley, that made it fun trying not to get hit by the second ball. I also worked at a Velvet Freeze as a soda jerk. And also at a lumber mill making Bailey Bridges for the Army.
I entered Cleveland High School, see figure 1-36, in January 1941. I started out by taking simple courses including “Everyday Math”. I did not know any better – no one in my family had ever gone to college , so it did not enter my mind. A math instructor (I wish I could remember his name – I owe a lot to him), told me to get out of that class and take college prep courses. I did, and finished four years of math in three and one-half years.
I played the viola in the high school orchestra, but I did not go out for any sports, I was one of the first nerds. I also worked after school in a Kroger grocery store.
When I graduated from Cleveland High School in January 1945, I got a job at Mallenckrodt Chemical Works in North St. Louis, as a laboratory technician. This job initially involved working with a chemist trying to duplicate (now called reverse engineering) a Kodak film developer (fluid which develops photographic film). This involved the processing of photographic films and prints. A side job of this laboratory
involved producing copies of letters and memos of the U.S. Army Manhattan District
(the atom bomb program). This was before the time of Xerox machines. Mallenckrodt was a world leader in the production of ether and other high-grade laboratory chemicals. They were studying the use of ether to purify the uranium used in the bomb. I was later transferred to work with a chemist developing new methods and materials of containing and storing ether. Ether "spoils", becomes unusable in medical situations in a very short time. This assignment involved preparing different types of containers for ether and then placing them a room where they were heated and shaken for various periods of time. Once in a while the glass containers would break (explode) when they were removed from the apparatus - I still have a small scar from one of these explosions.