Christmas Eve at the Frauenthals’

University City sits on the western edge of St. Louis — close enough to downtown that the Wabash trains rumbled within hearing distance, far enough out that the streets were quiet, the lots were generous, and the houses had been built between the wars by families who wanted yards and porches and room. Gannon Avenue runs through one of the older Jewish neighborhoods of University City, lined with brick four-squares, fieldstone bungalows, and the occasional larger Tudor revival. The Frauenthals had their house on Gannon. By the late 1940s it was the gathering point for the extended Frauenthal-Ebsworth-Walhus family every Christmas Eve.

Barney’s family lived several miles east, on Kingshighway — the downstairs of a two-story flat with white limestone steps that he and Muriel were supposed to scrub on Saturdays. He was twelve when they moved there. The bedroom he and Muriel shared was scarcely big enough for the bunk beds; Barney had the top, Muriel the bottom (or the other way around, depending on which year you ask about); when their Aunt Jean stayed over, she slept on the convertible sofa bed in the next room. That was the household, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that drove west on Christmas Eve to the Frauenthals’ on Gannon.

The arrival

Barney and Muriel were born on February 11, 1934. As twins they did everything together — school, sports, summer jobs, the corkball games in the alley with the sawed-off broomsticks — and Christmas Eve at the Frauenthals’ was no exception. Through the late 1940s and 1950s, the two of them piled into whichever car the family was using that year, with Barney Sr. and Helen if their parents were driving, or by themselves once the twins had a license between them, and made the short drive west on Delmar or down Olive to University City. They pulled in around three or four in the afternoon on the twenty-fourth.

The Hot Springs cousins came when they could; Aunt Helen’s sister Virginia and her husband Don Walhus drove or trained up from Arkansas with their small son Paul through the late 1940s and 1950s, becoming a regular Christmas Eve fixture at Gannon Avenue from the time Paul was about five years old. Aunt Jean Frauenthal — later Aunt Jean Cinader once she married Bob — came in by whatever route she was on that year. The Frauenthal-generation aunts and uncles whose exact relations the 4th edition is still working to confirm (Uncle Ed, Bernice, Alec, and others) lived close enough to walk over or to drive a few blocks. By six o’clock the parlor was full.

The cedar tree and the candles

The Frauenthal Christmas tree was a cedar — cut from a stand the family knew somewhere out toward Wildwood or Chesterfield, brought home tied to the roof of a car on the morning of the twenty-third. Cedar smells more sharp and turpentine-like than the imported firs that would come to fill the country’s holiday trees a generation later; it is the smell of mid-century Missouri Christmases for any St. Louisan of Paul’s generation, and for Barney, who had grown up on it himself and knew it as the smell of his mother’s family home, it was a smell that meant the Frauenthals.

The ornaments were the ornaments the Frauenthal household had accumulated since the 1920s — small German glass globes that had survived two world wars and one repacking each January, paper chains the children of various holidays had made, clip-on wooden birds, and a tin star at the top that had been bent slightly out of true sometime in the late 1930s and never re-trued. Candles — the real kind, with real wicks — were lit briefly in the early evening, watched closely by an aunt with a wet cloth in one hand, and then blown out before dinner. The tin candle clips on the cedar branches survived in their tin biscuit box on a high closet shelf for decades after the practice itself stopped.

The long table

The table sat fourteen with both leaves in. Children were seated last, at the end nearest the kitchen, where the swinging door brought a steady stream of the gravy boat and the rolls being refilled. Whoever among the Frauenthal-generation hosts was carving did the carving; the kitchen was a duet of the sisters — Helen and Virginia together, sister to sister, ferrying the platters out and circulating in the way that women of their generation did at family meals.

Barney himself, through these years, was the older male cousin who could be relied on to do the talking. By his late teens he was already restless, already half a generation older in worldliness than the cousins around him, already (by 1955 or so) talking about the Air Force assignment in Europe that would eventually put him in Paris and, in the next breath, with Martine. Paul, ten years younger and at the small-cousin end of the table, listened. Most of what he later put together about the trajectory of his cousin’s life was first spoken across that long table in University City, on a Christmas Eve, between the second pour of wine and the first slice of pie.

Muriel

Muriel was the other half of the equation. Twins from birth, she and Barney shared a bedroom on Kingshighway, organized the neighborhood sports together (Muriel was the better athlete of the two; Barney would say so himself in his autobiography fifty years later), and made the short drive to the Frauenthals’ on Christmas Eve year after year as a unit. Paul’s child-memory of her is consistent across the years: she was warm, she was scrappy, she was Barney’s match in a way nobody else in the family quite was.

By the mid-1950s Muriel was teaching school in St. Louis — serious enough about it that she could not take time off to fly to Paris for Barney’s March 1958 wedding to Martine. The autobiography records her absence with the kind of plain regret a brother shows for a missed milestone: she was supposed to be there, and the family chose work over the wedding because the family always chose work. By the late 1950s she had her own life forming around teaching and friends and the St. Louis network, but Christmas Eve at the Frauenthals’ remained a constant. Through those years the phrase “Barney and Muriel” named a unit that arrived at the Gannon Avenue house every December twenty-fourth.

Aunt Jean’s years

The years Aunt Jean was there were the years the Frauenthal Christmas Eve became a story-telling night. By the mid-1950s Bob Cinader was already in the orbit of Jack Webb at NBC, working on the radio and early-television iterations of the procedural shows that would later become Dragnet and Adam-12 and Emergency!. Jean would arrive in St. Louis from California by train or by a propeller flight that was still a long way from a routine trip; some years Bob came along, some years she came alone. The years Bob came down to Missouri were the years the University City family met one of the most successful television producers of the era at their own dining table.

What Bob talked about, when he talked, was the work. Stories about Jack Webb’s habits in the editing room. Stories about how the LAPD had let Mark VII ride along to research Adam-12. Stories — later in the run — about how the LA County Fire Department had agreed to let them use Squad 51 and the actual paramedic protocols for Emergency!. In the small University City dining room, with the ham being passed and the candles already blown out and the children half-listening from the end of the table, Hollywood arrived in St. Louis for one night a year and explained itself across the gravy boat.

After dinner

After dinner the children were dispatched to the parlor and the cedar tree, where the small wrapped gifts — the ones from the smaller branches of the family — were opened by lamplight, on the rule that the bigger Christmas-morning gifts waited until the morning, but that the Christmas Eve gifts were opened that night. Paul has a clear memory of unwrapping a small wooden train car that Barney had brought him — possibly 1952 or 1953, when he was eight or nine, when Barney was eighteen or nineteen and home from his first year at Washington University — and of Barney crouching down beside him on the parlor rug to show him how the couplings worked.

The adults stayed at the table or moved to the porch, depending on the weather. St. Louis Christmas Eves swing wildly in temperature: some years it was forty degrees and the porch was bearable in coats, some years it was twenty and everything happened indoors, some years there was a wet snow on Delmar Boulevard that almost kept the Hot Springs car out of town. Coffee came out. Pie was sliced and sliced again. Helen and Virginia together at the kitchen sink, sister to sister, washing the silver. Barney Sr. and Don Walhus on the porch. Barney Jr. and Bob Cinader — on the years Bob was there — in chairs pulled close together in the parlor, talking. Muriel between rooms, talking to everyone in turn.

The end of the night, the end of the era

By eleven o’clock the children were down. The cars were in the drive for the night; the Kingshighway crowd, including Barney and Muriel, slept at the Frauenthals’ if there was room or drove the few miles back home if not. By midnight the parlor was quiet. The cedar tree was lit by one small lamp left on. The presents for the next morning were arranged underneath. Outside, University City was as quiet as a streetcar suburb gets on the night before Christmas — the streets dark, the porch lights off, the cold air settled in.

The tradition held for two decades in essentially this form. The first thinning came in the early 1960s, when the Frauenthal elder generation began to die. Barney was traveling more, building INTRAV (founded 1959), soon enough married to Martine in 1958 and managing baby Christiane and a startup travel company on a brutal schedule, then divorced by 1961, then remarried into the Trish years that pulled him into a different orbit. Muriel had her teaching career and her own household. Aunt Jean and Bob were caught in the production cycle of a new Mark VII show every other year. By 1965 the Christmas Eve gathering at the Frauenthals’ on Gannon was either a much smaller version of itself or had moved — one year somebody else hosted, another year Bob and Jean’s in Los Angeles, another year Hot Springs at the Walhuses’ — until eventually it stopped being one night at one house and became a memory that the cousins and their mothers carried in different cities for the rest of their lives.

What Paul remembers most clearly is not any single Christmas Eve but the cumulative one. The long table on Gannon Avenue with both leaves in. The cedar smell. The big cousin and his twin sister Muriel and the small wooden train car on the parlor rug. Aunt Jean from California, and Bob telling Jack Webb stories. Helen and Virginia at the sink. The four-state family for one night a year. The Frauenthal house in University City holding all of it. The drive back across St. Louis on the twenty-fifth, with Helen and Barney Sr. up front and the twins in the back seat, the back of the car full of the wrapped gifts and the Christmas leftovers wrapped in waxed paper for the trip back to Kingshighway.

This piece is a draft. It is the kind of memory-based passage that needs Paul’s line edits before it goes into the 4th edition proper, and it is the kind that may well attract corrections, additions, and small remembered details (a particular Christmas, a particular gift, a particular thing Bob said about Jack Webb) from any of the cousins or descendants who recognize the night.

Gannon Avenue, University City, Missouri. Christmas Eve.
The cedar tree is in the parlor. The car is in the drive.
Barney and his twin sister Muriel are home for the night.