My Dad

One hundred years ago today, on October 10, 1914, my dad, Fred Joseph Louis Schuler, was born in a bedroom in a flat above a saloon at 14^th and Clark in St. Louis, Missouri, a rugged neighborhood. The saloon was owned by his grandfather, Joe Schuler, and run by my grandparents.

Esther, my dad’s mother, my grandmother, was, to put it kindly, eccentric. She adopted every fad or quack idea. She was a disciple of Bernard McFadden, a Rosicrucian, and a Christian Scientist. She dressed my dad in Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits which, as you might imagine, were very popular in the gritty inner city neighborhood where they lived. My dad grew up tough with his fists clenched.

“Saloon” doesn’t really cover the place that my grandparents ran. Joe Schuler was politically connected and the real money in the place was in what would now be called a catering business. They had the contracts to feed the prisoners in the City Jail, the judges and other workers at the City Court, and the workers at the nearby City Hall. My dad had the job of using his little red wagon to transport the tin-covered plates of food from the saloon-restaurant to the jail, courts, even the City Morgue. Another early job was distributing half-pints of whiskey to voters on election day. Those were the days!

When he was 10 or 12 he was the batboy for the St. Louis Browns baseball team. I still have a signed team ball he received.

After an elaborate grade school graduation ceremony (my dad was the first in his family to graduate from grade school, high school, college, or grad school) my dad attended Roosevelt High School, at the time the best high school in the city, with other middle class and upper middle class kids. He graduated from high school at 16 and entered Washington University.

At Wash. U. my dad became editor of the college paper and something of a campus character. He created a bit of a stir with an editorial defending the rights of co-eds to smoke (more or less along the lines of “they have the right to make themselves as disgusting as they care to”). I’ll publish that some time. After becoming a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the president of the men’s academic honorary society he graduated with honors and entered Washington University’s law school, graduating three years later, also with highest honors.

After graduating from law school in 1937, my dad made a bold decision. He decided to take the last of the money he’d inherited from his grandfather and spend a year travelling Europe. He spent the full year 1937-1938 touring Europe and North Africa, filling journal after journal with details of his adventures and sending every scrap he’d written or collected home. I still have everything and I’ll get around to editing and, perhaps, publishing his journals one of these days.

He was in Munich on November 9 and 10, 1938. The bizarre and frightening events of those days (along with the note that he, along with all other Americans in Europe at the time, received from the State Department telling him to get the heck out—which I also have) convinced him it was time to return home.

When he returned the Great Depression of the 1930s was still ongoing and jobs were hard to come by. The first job he got was as editorial writer for the old St. Louis. It didn’t pay much. Shortly thereafter he got a job as an insurance claims adjuster.

After doing that for several years he finally got a job as an associate with one of the most prestigious law firms in St. Louis where he worked for the next five or so years until the firm collapsed in scandal. When it collapsed he was left with some of the clients he’d been working with so he decided to go into practice on his own. That, along with teaching law school at St. Louis University, kept body and soul together for him and his young wife, my mother.

Despite his most diligent efforts my dad did not go to war. He was 4F for his vision. After the war he got a call from the OSS, that which was to become the CIA, to go undercover to Europe but at that point he was married with a family (me) so he demurred.

Lest this post become too long I’ll skip to the end.

My dad excelled at just about everything he turned his hand to. He was a fine athlete, a good ball player, swimmer, and a champion tennis and handball player (he thought gloves were for sissies). He had a nice baritone voice. He was a superb scholar and a good, forward-thinking attorney. At the time of his death he was beginning to give workshops on computer law, decades before computers were to become consumer products. He was also kind, gentle, courageous, and adventurous. I am not half the man he was.

Every so often I run into someone whose life he touched and influenced and that influence is still felt today, all these years after his death at too-young an age. That’s the kind of man he was.