St. Louis has long been known as the gateway to the West, yet the city is southern in its temperament, customs, and climate. The winters are cool, the summers, hot and humid. In Mickey’s day, the schools closed whenever the thermometer hit ninety degrees Fahrenheit. The children would race home to cool off any way they could, often under a spray of water from a garden hose.
While the city’s steamy weather wilts people, it is ideal for plants. Another St. Louis image that was etched into Mickey’s memory was the lushness of the vegetation. “Foliage played a large part [in] my childish life,” she recalled, “though it had at least as much to do with eating as with beauty in the eye of the beholder. I was always nibbling at flowers.”1
Sometimes Hannah would pack up her three youngest children and take them on a summer holiday in the country. They traveled by train to Lake Mendota, in Madison, Wisconsin, or to a farm in Michigan. As they grew older, Helen, Dauphine, and Mickey were shipped off to summer camp on their own. Otherwise, they idled away the endless summer days rocking on the front porch swing, rambling around the neighborhood, or lolling about the house reading.
Wherever she was, whetever she was doing, until she was well into her teens, Mickey could be found clinging to her best friend: Teddy (named after President Roosevelt) was a miniature brown teddy bear that Mickey bought with her allowance when she was eleven. “Probably I wouldn’t have been so wacky about him if I’d been permitted to keep live pets,” she explained.2 This love of animals would be a recurring theme throughout Mickey’s life.
Like Mary’s little lamb, Teddy followed his owner to school one day. Miniature bears were still something of a novelty, and so the grade six classmates made a great fuss. In an effort to restore order, the teacher snatched the bear away. Mickey panicked. Unable to decide whether to laugh or cry, what came from her mouth was a loud braying that startled everyone. Embarrassing though it may have been, the outcry evoked the desired result; the teacher immediately promised to return Teddy after school.
Mickey made clothes for her beloved furry friend, talked to him, drew pictures of him on her school books, and read him stories. Reading was a favorite pastime. Mickey’s kid sister Dauphine recalled, “[Mickey] didn’t like to play rough games. She’d disappear and read as much as she could.”3 Unfortunately, Teddy Roosevelt himself had something to say on the matter. “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life,” he had proclaimed. Hannah Hahn and millions of other Americans of the day subscribed to the same muscular philosophy. She insisted her daughters spend their days playing in the fresh air. After all, too much reading ruined young eyes. Mickey, Dauphine, and Helen were restricted to just thirty minutes of pleasure reading each day, an hour once they got older.
This proved to be a particular hardship for Mickey. She was an indifferent student, and she admitted, “I was good in subjects I liked, lousy in others, such as French and Latin. I flunked each once.”4 Nevertheless, she was a voracious reader, having taught herself to sound out words when she was a toddler. Until she was three, Mickey had been slowed physically by a brace that she wore to compensate for the twisting of one of her legs during her breech birth—or so family legend had it. However, the presence of the brace also gave her an excuse to spend endless hours browsing through her father’s library. She loved to thumb through the big Webster’s Dictionary that was always open on a lectern in the parlor. Mickey fell in love with books; it was as simple as that. Her notion of luxury as a child was to be allowed to read at the table during meals, a pastime her parents strictly forbade.
Despite her general aversion to physical activity, Mickey was a self-described “natural wanderer.” As she grew older and her reading skills improved, she roamed far and wide in the boundless universe of her imagination. Her companions and friends on these literary ramblings were such popular authors of the day as Dickens, Kipling, and Twain; she adored them all. Writing more than half a century later in her book Times and Places, she confided, “I found playing outdoors boring until I learned to hide books under the back porch or in a peach tree’s cleft. After that, it was simply a matter of finding some spot out of sight where I could read in peace.”5
“People were always telling us how lucky we were to be a big family,” she wrote. “The world we grew up in was secure; our brother and sisters were always our champions. Though we might have our little spats, who didn’t? In the end, the family was the important thing, cemented by love and loyalty. I have never doubted the fundamental truth of that concept, but I’m not so sure the spats were all that trivial.”6
In later years, the three younger girls would remember how it was their mother who refereed family squabbles. It was also Hannah who raised them. What Mickey recalled best about her mother was her fiery temper. Hannah was “a door slammer” who was as quick with a slap on the backside when one was needed as she was with a hug. Once, after being spanked for some misdeed, a sobbing Mickey cautioned her mother, “You just wait until you’re little and I’m big!”
It is unlikely that Hannah Hahn worried. She lost none of her feistiness as she grew older. During her working days, she had created a mild scandal in St. Louis by wearing bloomers as she rode her bicycle. Hence, Hannah was puzzled and somewhat disappointed when her own two youngest daughters, Mickey and Dauphine, refused to go to their public school in knickers. However, by the time the girls reached high school they were sufficiently rebellious to be attracted to the prospect of doing so.
To say their outfits attracted attention would be an understatement. The first morning they wore their knickers Mickey and Dauphine drew stares on the way to school and attracted the scorn of their teachers. As Mickey and Dauphine crossed the schoolyard on the way home, two newspaper photographers awaited them. A photo and an article dealing with “immodest attire” appeared in the next day’s papers.
Hannah Hahn backed her daughters in their defiance. In fact, if they had wavered in their convictions, they would have faced the daunting prospect of explaining why to their mother, who delighted in the refusal of her offspring to back down from the fight.
By contrast, Isaac Hahn’s presence in the household was muted. He traveled a lot on sales trips, and his homecoming was usually an event. When Hannah knew Isaac was coming, she dispatched Helen, Mickey, and Dauphine to the streetcar stop to greet him. The three girls made a fuss as he got off, but Mickey’s enthusiasm was mostly perfunctory. The truth was, she was frightened of her father. For one thing, he disliked the noise that the three young sisters were wont to make. For another, it was obvious to everyone that he played favorites. Pretty, red-haired Dot was his pride and joy. “I carried on … only because the others were doing it,” Mickey admitted in Times and Places.7 It was not until she became much older that Mickey really came to love and understand her father.
A Hahn family portrait, circa 1917. Pictured are (back row, l–r) Helen, Rose, Mickey, (front row, l–r) Dauphine, Isaac, Dorothy, Hannah, and Mannel.
Courtesy Charless Hahn
The sibling rivalry that was a constant underlying theme of life in the Hahn household goes a long way toward explaining the hows and whys of Emily Hahn’s early life. Long after she had grown up and had left home, Mickey carried with her a burning desire to succeed and a nagging sense of insecurity. Her self-image was defined almost as strongly by who she was not as by who she was. Mickey would never forget how her parents treated her older siblings, Mannel, Rose, and Dot, as adults who were permitted to live their own lives. “Helen, Dauph(ine), and I were cut off … not by age, but by euphony, I suppose,” Mickey once wrote. “We had our supper in the kitchen, while the three older ones dined [with their parents]. Helen longed to make that jump, and she did. Then she found out that she was bored stiff and wanted to come back. We didn’t let her.”8
All five of the Hahn girls were bright and attractive, but it was Helen who was graced with the kind of “knockout good looks” that set male hearts aflutter. Mickey one day chanced to overhear her parents discussing Helen’s beauty. Physical appearance was not a measuring stick that Hannah and Isaac Hahn normally used to compare their daughters, and their offhand comments had a profound impact on Mickey. She had always felt superior to Helen, whose dark curly hair had to be painstakingly combed out and glossed each morning by “the upstairs girl.” Now Mickey began to regard Helen’s appearance with a mixture of envy and despair. She also began studying the illustrations in the fairy-tale books that Dot collected. What she saw distressed her. The fairy princesses bore a striking resemblance to Helen. “I didn’t repine over my shortcomings or refuse to believe they existed; I conceded them,” Mickey wrote. “If the world wanted graceful, blue-eyed princesses with curls, it would have to make out with Helen. I had Webster.”9
While that was true enough, the dictionary’s therapeutic powers proved limited. As the three younger Hahn sisters began dating, a spirited rivalry developed for clothes and for the boys they started bringing home for inspection. The Hahn household became a busy place.
Both Hannah and Isaac Hahn took a keen interest in meeting the young men their daughters dated. Since all visitors were considered “public property,” the parents, the older sisters, and sometimes even big brother Mannel would “pounce,” as Mickey put it, anytime a new “gentleman caller” appeared. “As soon as a stranger was led into the parlor—which is what we called our sitting room—the place got terribly crowded, because everybody piled in, curious and full of hospitality. En masse, the family took over, and it was just like a party.”10 Everyone in the Hahn household played the piano or violin, and of course Isaac loved to sing, so it was never long before passersby on Fountain Avenue would hear “Whispering Hope” or “Sweet and Low” wafting from the house as a family sing-along began.
Painfully aware of the hazards of bringing home for inspection any young man whom she favored, Mickey was determined to find a way around the ritual. Inevitably, her first date raised parental eyebrows. For one thing, it occurred during her sophomore year at high school, when she was just fifteen. For another, she ignored family protocol by announcing one Saturday evening that she was going to the movies with a boy named Charlie Waugh, who sometimes walked her partway home after school. Mickey recalls two things about her first date. One was how her older sisters lined up as she was leaving and chanted, “Be home early! Be home early!” The other was that she and Charlie talked mostly about books and poetry. By this point in her life, Mickey was growing more interested in literature, and the arts generally. “My writing just happened,” she said, “and it was still very private.”
On Saturday mornings, Mickey joined Helen in attending art classes at Washington University. Mickey sketched, painted, and sculpted. After class, she and Helen received extra guidance and encouragement from their sister-in-law. Nancy Coonsman Hahn was a noted sculptor who had married Mannel during the war. “Helen preferred to paint, but I would be a great animal sculptor, or a poet, or a violinist, or an exceedingly intellectual courtesan: the world was wide and lovely,” Mickey wrote in her book Kissing Cousins. “And then we moved to Chicago.”11