Origins — St. Louis, Windsor Castle, and the Two Lineages

Barney A. Ebsworth arrived in the world at two-thirty in the afternoon on July 14, 1934, in a St. Louis hospital without air conditioning. The temperature outside was 105 degrees. Unemployment in the United States that month stood at roughly one-quarter of the working-age population. Franklin Roosevelt was eighteen months into his first term, Prohibition had been repealed the year before, and Adolf Hitler — sixteen days earlier, in the Night of the Long Knives — had just consolidated absolute power over Germany. The Dionne quintuplets had been born on May 28th and were the subject of a national fascination that would, briefly, terrify Barney's father.

Barney's twin sister, Muriel Louise, had arrived four hours earlier, at ten-thirty that morning. When the nurse emerged from the delivery room to tell Alec Ebsworth that his first child was a girl, Alec — who, like every expectant father of the era, had been made to pace the hallway rather than enter the delivery room — asked with genuine surprise: “The first one?” He had not known there were two. The Dionnes had been in the news for forty-seven days, and Alec briefly pictured himself handed five children in quick succession. It was not that; it was just one more. But the four hours between the first one and Barney, Alec's mother-in-law would later note, were hot enough to melt tire rubber on Lindell Boulevard.

This is, by any reasonable measure, an auspicious beginning — a Bastille Day birth in the middle of the Great Depression to an English-born father and a St. Louis mother whose own father had helped invent the idea of tourist information in America. The child born that afternoon would, before his life was over, assemble a collection of American modernist painting that would sell at Christie's in 2018 for $317.8 million, set a new world auction record for Edward Hopper, and, along the way, found two cruise lines, build a travel company large enough to charter private Concordes around the world, befriend Georgia O'Keeffe, and live next door to Bill Gates. His own account of the life begins with a declaration that is the Ebsworth family motto rendered in a single line:

But luck, in Barney's telling, is not a lottery ticket. It is a foundation, and the foundation is specific: “Two loving parents,” he writes, and then spends the first chapter of his 2012 autobiography explaining where those parents came from. The rest of this Part does the same, with one difference: it follows the threads in both directions, because each of Barney's grandfathers lived a life so specific, and so unlike the other, that they deserve separate treatment.

The World the Twins Were Born Into

To understand Barney's origin, it helps to stand for a moment in the St. Louis of 1934. The city had 821,960 residents and was the seventh-largest in the United States, down from fourth-largest in 1900. The Mississippi River, which had made the city, had also — through the steady northward pull of the railroad grid toward Chicago — begun to unmake it, though nobody in St. Louis quite said that out loud. Streetcars ran on wooden poles strung above brick streets. Electric refrigerators were new enough to be announced in the newspaper when a neighbor bought one.

In July of 1934 the national unemployment rate stood at 21.7 percent, down from its 1933 peak of 24.9 but still catastrophic by any standard before or since. The federal Civilian Conservation Corps had been operational for fifteen months. The Works Progress Administration would not be created for another year. A quarter of working-age American men were, in the clinical language of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unattached to the labor force. On the Ebsworth twins' birth certificates, filled out by the attending physician, the entry under Father's occupation reads, unambiguously: Unemployed.

The year Barney was born was also the year Prohibition's repeal took full effect, the year the FCC was created, and the year Babe Ruth hit his 700th home run. Shirley Temple was five. Frank Lloyd Wright was sixty-seven and had just begun sketching the designs that would eventually include the Kirkwood, Missouri house Barney would rescue from demolition and donate to the public sixty-eight years later. Georgia O'Keeffe was forty-six and living in New York, eight years into a marriage to Alfred Stieglitz. Edward Hopper was fifty-two and would, five years later, paint a 1929 canvas called Chop Suey, a picture of two women in a Chinese restaurant. None of these people knew a child named Bernard Alec Ebsworth had been born in St. Louis on a Saturday afternoon. All of them would, in one way or another, come to define his life.

The Ebsworth Line — A Boy Born in Windsor Castle

Alec W. Ebsworth began life with what his son Barney later called “the most auspicious beginning an Englishman can have.” He was born in Windsor Castle. The sentence reads like the opening of a Victorian novel. In the interest of accuracy it needs a footnote immediately.

Alec's father — Barney's paternal grandfather — was a Grenadier Guard, an officer in one of the five regiments of Foot Guards tasked with protecting the British monarch. He commanded the regiment stationed at Windsor Castle, which was, and remains, the largest inhabited castle in the world and one of the official residences of the British sovereign. The castle was eight hundred years old when Alec was born in its infirmary. Barney liked to say that the whole operation ran with such precision that an official measuring stick was used to calculate the distance from each chair to each table in the royal rooms.

But the family did not live in the royal rooms. They lived in the casements — the stone cells built into the outer walls of the castle, designed in the medieval period to house the garrison. The infirmary, at least, sat opposite St. George's Chapel, where Henry VIII is buried and where Queen Elizabeth II would be laid to rest in 2022. It was, as Barney put it, both glamorous and cold. “Cold stone must have made it a terrible place to live,” he wrote, “but still, my dad was born in the castle's infirmary right across from St. George's Chapel.”

The Grenadier grandfather, and the six weeks that changed everything

Alec's father was, by any reasonable measure, a career warrior. He had been wounded twice in the Boer War, which ran from 1899 to 1902 — a conflict whose field medicine was so primitive that a septic scratch from barbed wire could kill a man in three days. He survived both woundings. When the First World War began in 1914, he went to France with the British Expeditionary Force as a brigadier general. He was wounded twice more on the Western Front. He received the Military Cross, the British Army's second-highest award for valor, behind only the Victoria Cross. And then, in late September 1918 — during what British commanders called the Hundred Days Offensive, the final Allied push that would break the German line at the Canal du Nord and send the Kaiser's armies retreating toward Berlin — he was shot again, and this time he died. It was six weeks before the armistice of November 11.

Barney, who was a student of the World Wars by the time he was ten and reading newspapers out loud at the kitchen table, understood the arithmetic of his own existence with some precision. If his paternal grandfather had not been killed in September of 1918, the Ebsworth family would not have spiraled the way it did. Alec would not have taken ship for the United States at eighteen. He would not have ended up in St. Louis in 1928. He would not have met Bernice Frauenthal at the St. Louis Railway Company in 1932. And Barney himself would not have been born.

Barney's fantasy — the word is his own — was that before his grandfather left for France the last time, he turned to fourteen-year-old Alec and said the words that would define the next four decades of his son's life: “Alec, you're the head of the family now.” Whether those words were ever actually spoken is something no one alive in 2012 could have confirmed. The death made them true regardless. It also gave Alec the role he would spend the rest of his life growing into — the buttoned-up Englishman, the stutterer, the father who could not say I love you but would drive his son to every scout meeting and every track meet and every date.

How Alec got to St. Louis

Alec, like a generation of young British men navigating the ruined postwar economy, wanted to emigrate. His mother made him finish high school and spend one year at Cambridge first. Barney writes that his father did exactly as instructed. The arrangement that got him to St. Louis in 1928 was made through an English cousin: Alec's maternal grandmother — Gran, as the Ebsworths called her — had emigrated to St. Louis in 1902 with her second husband, a master potter named William Ailen of the English Midlands, who had been hired to produce ornamental terra cotta for the 1904 World's Fair. After the Fair closed, the Ailens stayed. By 1928 Gran was a terrifying widow in south St. Louis, and she took in her English grandson without fuss.

Barney, who met Gran only once and was immediately scared of her, put it plainly in the book: “Gran was one tough cookie. Everyone was scared to death of her, adults and kids alike. You had to watch your mouth around her or risk her wrath, so when I met her later, I tried to keep my mouth shut.” She was, by the standards of a St. Louis Saturday afternoon in 1936, the equivalent of a five-star general. What she thought of her new English grandson in 1928 is not recorded. What he thought of her is not recorded either. What is recorded is that he stayed with her through his first American winter, found clerical work, and never went back.

The Frauenthal Line — Ask Barney about St. Louis

The maternal side of Barney's family is the side the 2012 autobiography mentions more briefly and the side where, for reasons we will come to, Paul Walhus's family records go deeper than Barney's own.

Barney's mother, Bernice Frauenthal Ebsworth — called Bern by everyone who knew her — was the youngest of the four children of Barney W. Frauenthal, the man after whom Barney was named. The elder Barney is, in his own right, a figure deserving of more than a paragraph. In 1892, at twenty-six, he became the manager of the passenger side of the newly-opened St. Louis Union Station — which, at its opening, was the largest train station in the world by covered square footage and handled more passenger traffic than any other single depot on the North American continent. Ticket agents under his supervision wrote train tickets all day, but they also fielded an increasingly disruptive secondary duty: answering questions from bewildered tourists about how to get around St. Louis.

One agent's complaint, as the elder Barney later told the story: “People come to the office wanting to know all about St. Louis, and we don't have time to write tickets.” Barney W. Frauenthal's response was to build, on his own initiative and at his own expense, the first dedicated tourist information bureau in the United States. It had no federal model and no municipal precedent. It existed to move bewildered strangers through the station and onto something else so his ticket agents could keep their lines moving. In doing so, he invented an institution that every major American city now has.

The 1904 World's Fair, and the first American city guidebook

Then came the Louisiana Purchase Exposition — the St. Louis World's Fair — which opened on April 30, 1904, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase (a year late, for complex financial reasons involving bond underwriting). By any measure it remains one of the largest single events in American civic history. The Fair ran for seven months. Sixty-two nations and forty-three states sent exhibits. Nearly twenty million visitors passed through the turnstiles. Daily attendance averaged 100,000. The X-ray machine, the ice-cream cone, the hot dog bun, and the electric typewriter all made their American debuts there. The Olympic Games were held in St. Louis that summer, the first Games ever staged in the Western Hemisphere.

Barney W. Frauenthal looked at the Fair's projected visitor counts and understood that his tourist information bureau, which had been barely adequate for peacetime Union Station traffic, was about to be overrun. His response was to write, publish, and sell the first-known guidebook to an American city. The cover carried his photograph — he had gone bald by twenty-nine — and a large question mark. The title was Ask Barney about St. Louis.

Bernice, Lillian, and the Veiled Prophet

Barney W. Frauenthal had four children: Edward, who would run the Westinghouse Air Brake Company and be known to the Ebsworth twins as Uncle Ed; Lillian, whose daughters and granddaughters would include, several decades later, Paul Terry Walhus; and Bernice, the baby of the family, who was not quite a decade younger than her siblings and grew up, Barney writes in the book, as “the economy version of Scarlett O'Hara.”

The line is a joke but not an empty one. After leaving Union Station, Barney W. Frauenthal became president of the St. Louis Railway Company, the streetcar-and-bus conglomerate that ran on tracks under the management of the city's Public Service Commission. That gave him real civic weight. More importantly, as far as Bernice was concerned, it gave him a significant role in the Mysterious Order of the Veiled Prophet — the St. Louis charitable fraternity founded in 1878, famous for its annual parade and debutante ball. The parade rode over the streetcar tracks. Bernice's father ran the streetcar tracks. Bernice grew up attending Veiled Prophet balls with the access of a civic insider's daughter, and — by her son's affectionate later description — with “a bit of a delusion of grandeur.”

In truth, the Frauenthals were not rich. They were respectable. The difference, in St. Louis in the 1920s, was socially immense and financially negligible. Bernice, who was cute and cuddly and Republican (her father had been a Democrat until he switched and served as sergeant-at-arms of a Republican National Convention in the 1890s, whereupon Bernice's political identity was settled for life), worked as a secretary at her father's streetcar company. Alec Ebsworth was hired there in early 1932 as a clerk. He was debonair and charming. He also had a stutter he tried to hide and no money at all. Bernice's political views and Alec's political views — her father had been the kind of Republican who later voted for Eisenhower twice; Alec was a lifelong British Labour sympathizer who would have voted for Clement Attlee if given the chance — nullified each other almost exactly. They married in March 1933.

July 14, 1934

One year and four months after the wedding, the twins arrived. The Ebsworths had not known they were having twins — prenatal imaging was still three decades away, and a second heartbeat at a routine physician's checkup was the kind of thing that got written off as an echo. Alec, pacing the hallway in late morning, spent the day convinced he was about to be a single father to an only child.

On Barney and Muriel's birth certificates, beside Father's occupation: Unemployed. Beside Mother's occupation: Housewife. The national unemployment rate was not yet the twenty-five percent it had been the year before, but it was close enough to be indistinguishable from a child's perspective. The twins' grandfather — the elder Barney Frauenthal — had done well enough that he could help them with the rent. Aunt Jean's post-office paycheck helped too. Alec's work was intermittent; his hundred dollars in the bank was usually less. When Barney, sixty years later, wrote the sentence “I worried that we were going to be separated when the money ran out,” he was describing the emotional weather of his entire childhood in nine words.

Muriel emerged first, at 10:30 in the morning. Barney followed four hours later. Alec, whose own father had been dead sixteen years by then and whose own childhood had been defined by a vacancy at the top, had two children to raise in an economy that had nothing to give him. He was a man, Barney later wrote, whose quiet role for the rest of his life would be to make sure his own children never felt the specific absence he had felt. He did not say “I love you.” He said it with his presence instead, and his presence was absolute.

The Flat on Kingshighway

The family moved to a two-story flat on Kingshighway Boulevard when the twins were twelve. The Ebsworths took the downstairs — living room of average size, a kitchen in the back, and a single bedroom for the twins that was, as Barney dryly recalled, “scarcely big enough for our bunk beds. There was just enough room to hit the floor when you climbed down from the top bunk.” Aunt Jean, on the weekends she stayed over, unfolded a convertible sofa in the living room. White limestone steps climbed from the street to the front door. The twins were expected to scrub them on Saturdays.

The Ebsworth childhood was not nature outdoors, Barney carefully specified. It was urban outdoors — the alley behind the flat, the schoolyard across the street, the kids on the block who organized pickup baseball games. Corkball, a sport that originated in St. Louis and used a smaller ball and a thinner bat than regulation baseball, was the default when nobody had a real bat. Sometimes, when no one had any ball at all, the kids played with sawed-off broomsticks and bottle caps. Every few weeks someone would miscalculate a swing and put a ball through a window. The standard response was to scatter.

Muriel, Barney's twin, was the tougher of the two. Barney was careful about this in the book and precise: she was not big, but she was scrappy. When the twins were five, a neighbor's mother offered to take them along on a trip to the grocery. A fight broke out in the backseat over who got the window seats. Muriel got a window. The two six-year-old girls next to them — together, pound for pound, outweighing both Ebsworth twins — beat the hell out of Barney. Muriel was, apparently, not a target. “She'd stick her nose out and people would back down,” Barney remembered. It was not until the twins' twenty-fifth high school reunion that Barney learned the full weight of his twin sister's reputation. He had walked up to the man who had been the class bully, grabbed his tie, and told him he was going to get him now that they were the same size. The man, mildly offended, replied that he hadn't been the real bully. The real bully, he said, was Barney's sister.

Muriel would go on to a life remarkably different from her twin's in its public profile and remarkably similar in its underlying fabric. She would letter in sixteen varsity sports over the course of her first two years of college. She would become a teacher. She would move to North Carolina with her husband Dave Mueller. She would raise four children, one of whom — Roger Mueller — would become a history teacher and a Peace Corps veteran who taught Western Civilization overseas, in a career arc that looks, if you squint, like a humanities-sector version of his uncle's business arc. The twins were not identical in any sense that mattered. But the shared energy — Muriel's competitive ferocity, Barney's quieter but relentless drive — was unmistakable. “I'd still pick her over most boys,” Barney wrote of neighborhood sports captaincy, and he meant it.

The King's Speech

The only time Barney could ever remember his father going to church voluntarily was in February of 1952. King George VI had died on the sixth of the month, suddenly, of coronary thrombosis, and the British community of St. Louis organized a memorial service. Alec, who had lived in the United States for all twenty-four years of George VI's reign, insisted on attending. To Barney, seventeen at the time, this looked like simple loyalism — an English father paying respects to the King of his birth country. He did not think much more of it.

Fifty-eight years later, in 2010, the film The King's Speech premiered. George VI had been a stutterer; the film told the story of his work with the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue in the run-up to the 1939 BBC radio address announcing Britain's declaration of war. Alec had been a stutterer too. It was something he tried to hide. It was something he was, in a way peculiar to men of his generation and class, quietly ashamed of. And it was, Barney finally understood watching the film, the reason his father had insisted on going to church in February of 1952. The King had stuttered, and had never quite mastered it, and had died. Alec had stuttered, and had never quite mastered it, and he had wanted to be in a pew when the English community of St. Louis remembered a man who had shared his single most private struggle.

The Last Line of Chapter One

The most revealing line in Barney's own account of his childhood is the one he saved for the end. After describing Aunt Jean's quiet faithfulness taking the twins to church on Sundays; after cataloging the baseball games and the broken windows and the corkball; after describing Alec's habit of reading every science fiction novel and every book about the World Wars that the local library would lend him; and after noting that Richard Halliburton's The Royal Road to Romance — a 1925 memoir by a Princeton graduate who called himself a horizon chaser and tramped alone through India, Indochina, Japan, and the Pacific — was the book Barney returned to more than any other, the twelve-year-old Ebsworth, lying on the top bunk in a bedroom the size of a closet in a flat on Kingshighway, had one thought. It is the closing line of Chapter One of Barney's 2012 autobiography. It deserves to close this part, too.

He was twelve. His father was still working clerical jobs for under five thousand dollars a year. His mother was home. His twin sister was in the bunk below him. His aunt was on the convertible sofa. The Saturday Evening Post had just printed its second Halliburton retrospective. The money was tight and the nights were hot and outside the open window, down on Kingshighway, a streetcar was passing under a line his grandfather used to run.

He would, in fact, go everywhere. The rest of this biography tells that story.