Head of the Family

Barney A. Ebsworth opens his autobiography with a declaration: I am a very lucky man. And then, unusually for an entrepreneur's memoir, he spends the entire first chapter explaining that his luck was not the kind that arrives with a cold phone call. It was the kind that arrives at birth, in the form of two parents he considered astonishing.

His father, Alec W. Ebsworth, began life with what Barney calls “the most auspicious beginning an Englishman can have.” Alec was born in Windsor Castle. His own father was a Grenadier Guard who commanded the regiment at Windsor — the one that stands, in its tall bearskin hats, outside the Queen's residence. For a moment the line reads like a gothic opening, all silver and long corridors. Barney cuts it short immediately. The family lived in the casements — a fancy word, he notes, for cells. His father was born in the castle infirmary, but the Ebsworths lived in cold stone.

The English side of the family is a small constellation of wars and disappearances. Alec's father — Barney's paternal grandfather — was wounded twice in the Boer War (1898–1899), twice more in World War I, received the Military Cross (second only to the Victoria Cross for valor), and then, six weeks before the armistice, was shot and killed. Alec was fourteen. His mother had a younger son and two younger daughters still at home. The family had already been run with strict military discipline; now the discipline had a vacancy at the top.

Barney's fantasy, stated plainly in the book, is 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 life: “Alec, you're the head of the family now.” Whether those words were ever spoken is impossible to know. The death made them true regardless.

The Other Barney

If the English side of the story is an end, the St. Louis side is a beginning. Barney's maternal grandfather — his namesake — ran the passenger side of St. Louis Union Station when it opened in 1892. Ticket agents there complained of being swamped by tourists asking about the city, so the senior Barney founded the first tourist information bureau in the United States, essentially to keep strangers away from his clerks.

Then, in 1904, the St. Louis World's Fair arrived. Sixty-two nations. Forty-three states. Nearly twenty million visitors over the run, averaging a hundred thousand a day. Barney's grandfather responded by writing, and self-publishing, the first-known guidebook to an American city. The cover bore his photograph (he was bald by twenty-nine) and a single large question mark. The title was Ask Barney about St. Louis.

Barney's mother was the baby of the Barney grandfather's family. After leaving the railroad he became president of the St. Louis Railway Company — which, despite the name, ran the streetcars and buses of the city. More importantly, from her perspective, her father was a big mucky-muck in the Mysterious Order of the Veiled Prophet, St. Louis's 1878 charitable fraternity whose annual parade still rivals Mardi Gras. Barney remembers his mother's childhood in its shadow affectionately, with a line that is pure Barney: she was, he writes, the economy version of Scarlett O'Hara.

Alec and Gladys were married in March of 1933. On July 14, 1934 — Bastille Day — Barney and his twin sister, Muriel, were born in the middle of the Depression. It was 105 degrees. Fathers did not enter delivery rooms in those days; they paced the hall. A nurse came out at 10:30 in the morning and told Alec his first child was a girl. The first? Alec had no idea there were two. The Dionne quintuplets had been born in May, and for a brief terrible moment he pictured five babies.

Barney did not make his appearance until 2:30 in the afternoon. All those hours in labor with no air conditioning, he writes. If that doesn't make you love your mother, I don't know what does.

Muriel, and the Art of Not Being Hit

The twins' birth certificates list their mother's occupation as Housewife and their father's occupation as Unemployed. The year was 1934 and unemployment was at twenty-five percent. Alec never finished college. Without the quiet help of the older Barney and of Aunt Jean, who lived with the family much of the time and worked at the post office, the Ebsworths would not have made rent. Barney, watching his father carefully, was convinced the family was sometimes just a missed paycheck away from being split up.

Muriel — whom Barney describes as scrappy rather than big — quickly revealed herself as nobody's submissive twin. At his twenty-fifth high-school reunion, Barney ran into a man who had been the class bully. Barney grabbed his tie. You and I are the same size now. You were the bully, but I'm going to get you. The man denied it, and then denied it again. Who was the real bully? he was asked. Your twin sister, came the answer. Barney had not realized, for twenty-five years, that a protector had been walking to school next to him.

Barney does not sentimentalize his parents. He describes them as plainly as he describes the landlord: Mom was more affectionate; Dad was more of a cheerleader. His mother was everybody's mother. His father was a buttoned-up Englishman with the matching difficulty expressing emotion. Alec never once said “I love you” — but Barney says it didn't matter, because he felt it anyway. Alec attended every sports meet. He became Boy Scout assistant scoutmaster and then, at some inner age that is nearly impossible to pin down in his son's retelling, he became a King's Scout in England and an Eagle Scout in the United States at the same time — the first person known to have achieved both — receiving his badge from Lord Baden-Powell himself, the founder of the Scout movement.

King George's stutter

The only time Barney remembers his father going to church was in February of 1952, for King George VI's memorial service. Barney had thought it strange. His dad had been in America the whole of George VI's reign. In the book he writes that he concluded his father was just being a loyal Englishman. Nearly sixty years later, the 2010 film The King's Speech premiered. King George was a stutterer. So was Alec. Barney finally understood.

The Urban Outdoors

The Ebsworths moved to Kingshighway when Barney was twelve, into the downstairs of a two-story flat with white limestone steps the twins were expected to scrub on Saturdays. The living room was average. The bedroom the twins shared was barely large enough for bunk beds, with exactly enough floor to land on when you climbed down from the top bunk. When Aunt Jean stayed, she slept on a convertible sofa. It was, Barney writes, cozy.

He and Muriel were outdoor children — not nature outdoors, Barney specifies, but urban outdoors. They organized the neighborhood into pickup baseball games in the alley behind the flat. Every few weeks they broke a window and scattered. When they couldn't afford a real ball they played corkball, which originated in St. Louis and used smaller balls and thinner bats, and when they couldn't afford those either they used bottle caps and sawed-off broomsticks.

Indoors, Alec read everything: science fiction, mysteries, two world wars' worth of history. Barney, watching, started reading the newspaper every afternoon at age eight. I knew that if we lost this war, our lives were going to be a lot different, he writes, so I paid attention. The habit compounded. By the time Barney's friends were grown he had become, in their telling, the guy who could write his own book about World War II.

His favorite books, though, were not war chronicles. They were travel narratives. Richard Halliburton's The Royal Road to Romance, about a young man who called himself a horizon chaser. Barney, twelve years old in a too-small bedroom in south St. Louis, read it and recognized himself.