About this chapter
Paul Walhus is the source. He spent summers at Chautauqua throughout his childhood and remembers it as one of the formative landscapes of his growing up. The specific Chautauqua — its county, its proximity to the nearest larger town, whether it was a formal Chautauqua-assembly community or simply a summer-cottage town that carried the name — awaits Paul’s confirmation of exact location. What follows is the family story of who was there, who wasn’t, and what the summers felt like.
Who was at Chautauqua — the summer household
The town
Chautauqua, Illinois, was one of hundreds of small summer communities that dotted the rivers and lakeshores of the Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century, many of them descended from the great Chautauqua movement that had spread out of western New York in the 1870s and planted assembly grounds, lecture halls, and cottage colonies from Ohio to Kansas to the bluffs of the Illinois River. By the time the Frauenthals had their cottage there, the high-minded lecture programs of the original movement had mostly given way to something quieter and more domestic: families with cottages, screen porches, shade trees, and the kind of summer routine that ran on lemonade and the sound of the screen door banging shut.
The town itself — Paul remembers it as idyllic, a word he does not use casually — was small enough that children could walk or ride bicycles from one end to the other without encountering anything more dangerous than a dog or a sprinkler. The cottages were not grand. They were the kind of summer places that families in the St. Louis middle class had maintained since the 1920s: wood-frame, one story or story-and-a-half, a screened porch across the front, a kitchen that served as the center of the house, and bedrooms that were hot in July and cool in September. The Frauenthals had one. The Kings had another, close enough to walk between.
The two cottages
The Frauenthal cottage
Grandma Frauenthal’s cottage was the anchor. She was there from the time school let out in June until the air turned in September, and the rest of the household orbited around her. Virginia brought Paul and Alice-Ann and settled in for the summer; they ate breakfast at Grandma’s table, came back for lunch, and were expected on the porch for supper. The cottage had the feel of a house that had been used the same way for decades: the same dishes, the same bedding, the same screen door that needed the same slap to close, the same spot on the porch where Grandma sat in the afternoon with whatever she was reading or mending.
Grandpa Frauenthal was in St. Louis during the week, working at Westinghouse Air Brake — the manufacturing giant that made braking systems for the nation’s railroads. He drove up on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings, spent the weekend at the cottage, and drove back to St. Louis on Sunday evening or early Monday. The pattern was the pattern of a million mid-century American families: the wife and children summered at the cottage; the husband worked and came when he could. Grandpa’s arrivals on Friday evenings were a marker of the week: the car in the drive, the overnight bag on the porch, and the weekend settling into a different, slightly more formal rhythm with both grandparents at the table.
The King cottage
Ann Frauenthal King — another of the Frauenthal sisters, Virginia’s sister, Helen’s sister, Jean’s sister — had married Harold King, and the two of them maintained the second cottage at Chautauqua. Ann followed the same pattern as Virginia: she was there most of the summer with the children, Corky and Carol, while Harold came when his schedule allowed. The Kings’ cottage was close enough that the children moved between the two houses freely, and the Frauenthal sisters — Virginia and Ann — ran the summers as a cooperative household, two kitchens, one family, with Grandma Frauenthal at the center.
Corky and Carol King were Paul’s Chautauqua cousins in the same way that Barney had been his Gannon Avenue cousin: the ones you grew up alongside in the summer, the ones whose names are permanently attached to the memory of a particular place. Paul and Corky and Carol and Alice-Ann were the children of Chautauqua — the ones who ran from cottage to cottage, rode bicycles through town, ate at whichever table had food ready first, and lived the kind of unsupervised childhood that the mid-century Midwest still permitted and that has largely vanished from American life.
The men, mostly absent
The rhythm of Chautauqua was set by the women because the men were elsewhere. Grandpa Frauenthal had Westinghouse Air Brake in St. Louis and came on weekends. Harold King came when he could. Don Walhus — Paul’s father — was almost never there. Don was a traveling salesman for Grey Rock Brakes, a division of Raybestos Manhattan, the asbestos-and-friction-products conglomerate that supplied brake linings and clutch facings to the American automotive and trucking industry. His territory kept him on the road through the Midwest and South for weeks at a stretch, and a summer cottage in Illinois was not a place a traveling brake salesman could easily get to on a weeknight.
The result was that Chautauqua was, functionally, a matriarchy. Grandma Frauenthal set the tone. Virginia and Ann ran the household logistics. The children had the run of the town. The men arrived on weekends, were fed and welcomed, and left again. The emotional life of the summers — the daily routine, the meals, the discipline, the stories told on the porch after supper — was entirely in the hands of the women.
Barney, occasionally
Barney visited Chautauqua occasionally — not as a regular summer resident but as the St. Louis cousin who came down for a weekend or a few days when the opportunity arose. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Barney was in school, then at Washington University, then in the Air Force, then in France, then building INTRAV at a schedule that left no room for Illinois summers. His mother Helen — the fourth Frauenthal sister, the one who had married Barney Ebsworth Sr. and moved to St. Louis — came to Chautauqua more regularly than Barney did, but even she had the pull of the Ebsworth household and the city to manage.
When Barney did visit, he was the older cousin from the city — ten years older than Paul, more worldly, already restless with the energy that would later build an empire. Paul’s memory of Barney at Chautauqua is not the memory of a summer companion but the memory of an occasional visitor who brought St. Louis energy into the quiet Illinois rhythm for a day or two and then left. Muriel — Barney’s twin sister — sometimes came along; the two of them were a unit in the same way they were at the Christmas Eves on Gannon Avenue, arriving together, leaving together.
The fact that Barney was not a regular at Chautauqua is itself a piece of the biography. It tells you what his summers were about even before INTRAV: work, school, the Air Force, the urgent forward motion that left no room for a screen porch in Illinois. The Frauenthal women and children summered. Barney did not summer. He visited, occasionally, and then he was gone again.
What the children did
Morning. The screen door at Grandma’s cottage bangs shut. Paul and Alice-Ann are already outside. Corky and Carol are coming up the road on bicycles. The day has no agenda. The town has no traffic. The only schedule is lunch at noon, supper at six, and the porch after dark.
The children of Chautauqua lived the way small-town Midwestern children lived in the years between the end of the war and the coming of television: outdoors, unsupervised, within earshot of the cottages but functionally free. Paul and Alice-Ann and Corky and Carol were the core group. They rode bicycles through town. They explored whatever creeks, fields, and wooded lots the edge of town offered. They ate at whichever cottage was closest when hunger arrived. They were called in by voices from the porch at dusk.
Paul’s memory of these summers is not of events but of texture: the heat of an Illinois July, the sound of cicadas in the trees behind the cottage, the taste of lemonade made from a mix in Grandma’s kitchen, the feel of the wooden porch rail under his hands as he sat and watched the fireflies come out after supper. These are the summers that the 4th edition is built on, in the sense that they are the reason Paul knows the Frauenthal family from the inside — not as a biographer researching a famous cousin, but as a boy who spent his summers in the same cottages with the same grandparents and the same aunts and the same cousins who produced, on one branch, a man who would build a billion-dollar company and assemble the most important private American art collection of his generation.
The Frauenthal sisters — the summer picture
Chautauqua gives us the clearest picture of the Frauenthal sister set — the generation that produced Barney’s mother on one branch and Paul’s mother on another. The sisters as the 4th edition can now identify them:
The Frauenthal sisters (confirmed as of April 2026)
Four sisters, now confirmed: Helen, Virginia, Ann, and Jean. Whether there were additional siblings (Bernice? Alec? Uncle Ed from the Gannon Avenue gatherings?) remains to be established. But the four-sister core is clear: one married into travel and art (Helen → Ebsworth), one married into brake sales (Virginia → Walhus), one married locally (Ann → King), and one married into Hollywood television (Jean → Cinader). Together they produced two cousins worth full biographies (Barney and Bob Cinader) and one cousin with the memory to write about them all (Paul).
When the summers ended
The Chautauqua summers ran through Paul’s childhood — roughly the late 1940s through the early 1960s, the same arc as the Christmas Eves on Gannon Avenue. As the Frauenthal grandparent generation aged and as the children grew into teenagers with summer jobs and their own lives forming, the cottage routine thinned. Grandma Frauenthal could no longer make the summers alone. Virginia had Paul in school and then in college. Ann and Harold’s children were growing up. The cottages were still there, but the family density that had made them a self-contained summer world was gone.
By the mid-1960s the Chautauqua chapter of the Frauenthal family story was effectively over, just as the Gannon Avenue Christmas Eves were ending at roughly the same time and for roughly the same reasons. The generation that had built the cottages and the holiday traditions — the Frauenthal grandparents, the four sisters in their prime, the children small enough to be contained by a porch and a bicycle radius — had moved on. What remained was the memory, carried forward by the children who had been there: Paul, Alice-Ann, Corky, Carol, and — from the occasional St. Louis visits — Barney and Muriel.
What Paul remembers most clearly is the porch. Grandma Frauenthal in her chair. The cicadas starting up behind the cottage. The light going long across the lawn. Corky and Carol’s voices somewhere down the road. Alice-Ann beside him on the rail. The screen door that needed the same slap every time. The men arriving on Friday, leaving on Sunday. The women holding the summer together. Chautauqua, Illinois.
Chautauqua, Illinois.
The Frauenthal cottage. The King cottage.
The women held the summer together.