Cheryl McKinley_F.R.E.S.H_Frank Schwaiger, brewmaster_Trudi Strauhs_Ford and Gladys Hendricks_Judy Paul_Mae Gravemann_Dotty Struckhoff_Frank Schwaiger, Jr.
Cheryl Schwaiger McKinley: I think of it as storytelling. If you told me the word, interview, I would sort of freak out, but…I tell stories all the time. So…I like it. I don’t think I’ve ever been interviewed in my life… Really, what I do, which I enjoy very much, is telling stories… and people ask me…the origin of the Schwaigerhof, and I go back to my dad immigrating (from Germany) in 1933, and it’s a fun story to tell. …I think there’s a real value…it’s teaching people history, and it’s teaching people about me…in a deeper way than just face value.
Gentle readers, that’s how my conversation with Cheryl started on December 4. 2024. And her words caused me to reflect again on the twisted way I use my writing to simultaneously tell stories about myself…the stranger who squatted for several months in a vacant building in Augusta, https://www.augustamomuseum.com/post/tell-it-like-it-was-ellen-berg-mallinckrodt I’m also the town painter, the Road Scholar (sounds better than the walking fool), the clueless historian, maybe the wandering musician, and the enigma wrapped up in a riddle (thanks, Winnie).
So, here’s the story. For decades I was a handyman/house painter about town, and in the late 90s or early aughts, I found myself working on a charming Bavarian-style cottage about a quarter mile east of Augusta. Some of you may know it as the headquarters of F.R.E.S.H. Even fewer of you know it as Schwaigerhof. And most of you have never seen it, and you’ll have to take my word for it that…one: it does exist…and two: it doesn’t look like any house in Augusta, but it does bear some resemblance to Betty Boffa’s house on Chestnut St., and likewise to Blumenhof Winery in Dutzow. And if you do see it (which is unlikely because it’s gated and now owned by Maryville University), you’ll be convinced that you’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
I enjoyed the atmosphere of the estate as I sawed boards, hammered, and painted, but eventually I wanted to know if this building had dropped out of the sky, complete with landscaping, or what? So, I asked my customer, Cheryl Schwaiger McKinley, how did this happen? And she told me about her father, Frank Schwaiger, Sr., the Anheuser-Busch brewmaster, who with his wife, Trudi Strauhs Schwaiger, built it. Of course, I forgot most of what she told me back then, but recently, Lee Newman of Marthasville, put me in touch with Cheryl, who currently lives in Palm Desert, CA. This time around, I had technology on my side. I called her at home, put her on speaker, turned on voice memo on my iPad, and presto! (Did you know that presto in German is presto?) (((And a reminder: any words within parentheses are my own.)))
.
pO: What year were you born? And where?
CM: 1947, the 2nd year of the baby-boom. St. Louis, MO…St. Mary’s Hospital…on the hottest day of the year…before air-conditioning, of course.
pO: And your parents?
CM: My dad is Frank Schwaiger; my mother is Gertrude Strauhs. Everybody called her Trudi, with an i.
pO: I’m going to circle back to Anheuser-Busch and F.R.E.S.H later, but the next question… I’d like to ask you about your early years growing up, and that might be where you begin to tell me about Schwaigerhof.
CM: Well, I grew up in the city, went to school at Villa Duchesne…which is a convent school, but I was a day-student, thank the lord. And we lived in Ladue…and prior to that in an apartment building in different places… You’re taking me to places I never think about much.
pO: Okay…?
CM: My dad was told by his doctor that he needed to develop a …hobby to reduce the stress in his life. And the doctor suggested either golfing or a little place in the country where he could get away on the weekends…relax. So, they were being careful about his health and wanting to give him a less stressful way of living…and golf would just not be my dad at all. So, he and mom started to look around in the country for places from Hermann…to I don’t know where.
This would have been…probably 1960, so, I would have been probably a freshman in high school. And by about ’62, I think, they settled on Augusta because of the rolling countryside. It reminded them of their home which was Bavaria. Finding a plot of land…thinking about it…purchasing the land from the…let me think who it was…
pO: Could it have been a Nadler?
CM: No. It was the people…they had 3 or 4 boys…they owned right where the Buddhists are…they had a big lake at the back of their property. And Ford Hendricks was living on a sliver of that land…Ford and Gladys Hendricks; those became our neighbors.
Ford and Gladys now rest in the Augusta town cemetery. I remember Ford as a friendly guy who was often in the company of Ed Gloer.
CM: Dad purchased this land, and then he wanted to try out…could we maybe live in a small cabin? …just come out there and have a picnic on the weekends. And he read in the Wall Street Journal that there was something called a prefab cabin which he thought was a marvelous idea. It was the first attempt to put planks together with a roof. You know…you deliver it…somebody puts it together…no plumbing…and we tried that out for a couple summers, and Mother said this is not going to do. We need to have a sink and a toilet…and a place to cook, get warm, and so on… And that began the construction of the house that’s currently there. And that was finished I think in ’63.
CM: It just came back to me; Hueffmeier was the person who sold us the land.
Schwaigerhof. (Don’t ask me how I got this photo.)
CM: And I know that they did a lot of grooming of the land…consulting with the Conservation Department to put in a big lake… Constructing the driveway required putting in a little lake to manage the water flow…and cutting all the woods to a point where you could use it as pasture. And it was about a hundred acres…I think about 40% was in fields, which it still is, and the other 60% would have been hills with woods on it…just primeval woods; it hadn’t been affected in any way. And some of it’s still like that. So, that was the beginning of the Schwaigerhof…hof in German means something like farm or farmyard. So, it’s kind of like the gathering place for the animals and the people in the farmyard…with our name in front of it, Schwaiger.
CM: Mom really took over the decoration; that was her strong point. She was an artisan and an artist…and she made a balcony that simulated balconies of Bavaria and Austria. She put flowerboxes out front with geraniums, like they do in Bavaria. They put in a…beautiful big fireplace. Made it extremely kind of cozy and warm…and lively at the same time.
CM: We were able to use that place…and become very attached to it…every single weekend. We’d load up the car on Friday, early…with the dogs, and freshly washed linens, the food…and really look forward to going out to the country because of the whole connection with nature…would let your mind unwind from work or school. This is before air conditioning. We would sit out on the balcony…under an umbrella in the morning at breakfast…and in the evening, late into the night with those citronella candles…listening to the frogs in the big lake. I was still a girl between the ages of 13 and 17…and I learned how to go down there with flashlight and a net to catch the frogs…potentially eat them. That became less of an option for me, because they were so cute. It was tremendous fun for a kid; I did a lot of trekking through the woods too, back then. I don’t do that kind of thing by myself anymore, but I still do a lot of trekking, but with others.
CM: Mom wanted to learn everything there was to learn about being a farmer in Missouri. And Ford, she asked to teach her how to squirrel hunt. And he did. And she learned how to shoot a gun… She wanted to really get into it, which was part of her nature…getting involved…with your hands dirty…really doing-it-yourself kind of person. She developed a realy close relationship with Gladys. Gladys became part of our family in a way…helping us to clean up when we left…helping us to serve when we had guests. We would cook…the kitchen’s really small and you had to learn to navigate with other people in the kitchen. We were kind of a ballet…pulling the turkey out of the oven, and not hitting the person making drinks, and so on.
CM: You know, Ford Hendricks drove a tractor…some kind of skid loader…a truck over at Klondike. And he died, of course, of that disease that everybody got.
pO: Silicosis.
CM: …from inhaling particles, years, and years, and years. I understand he used to go hunting with Hubie Mallinckrodt. They talked about coon hunting a lot.
Gentle readers, let me break in and relate to you a snippet of a 11/9/24 conversation with Judy (Heger) Paul who grew up on Heger Lane which is near Schwaigerhof.
Judy Paul: My dad was a good friend to…his name was Henry Hendricks, but we all called him Ford.
pO: Oh, I remember Ford.
JP: Well, their property was adjoining the Schwaigers’. Ford was the one that took care of the place because they (Schwaigers) weren’t here all the time. Ford and my dad both worked at Klondike. In fact, my dad ran the big crusher, and Ford ran a truck. And they would load his truck up, and then he would bring that truck up to my dad’s crusher, and dump it into that crusher. So, they would see each other multiple times a day. They hunted together. And if dad had animals…Ford was not a veterinarian, but he was as close as you can get to one without having a degree. So, he would go and help out with my dad’s cattle, and anything that he needed.
Gentle Augustaphiles, Judy Paul helped me in one more way when she told me that Gladys Ford had children by a previous marriage. One child was Carl “Fritz” Gravemann who is deceased, but…Carl’s wife, Mae (Hindersmann) Gravemann, is still kicking, and she was kind enough to let me ask her a few questions about Schwaigerhof.
Mae Gravemann: I was there 2 years, and I cleaned for her.
pO: Did you like it?
MG: Yeah. It was fine. They were very nice people. …but you knew that he was vice-president of the brewery in St. Louis, did you not?
pO: I do know that, and thanks for mentioning that. In part 2…well, I found a wonderful article all about his time at Anheuser-Busch. He was pretty powerful in that company.
MG: They were just wonderful people, and wonderful to work for.
pO: How long do you think your mother-in-law worked there?
MG: Probably 17 or 18 years. And she did some cooking for them. And Gladys went down to St. Louis to their apartment sometimes to cook for them.
pO: That’s interesting. Did you ever go fishing there, or go for a walk?
MG: My husband always fished there…and Dr. Tolksdorf.
pO: I never met Dr. Tolksdorf, but I knew he had a veterinary business in Washington.
MG: Dr. Tolksdorf took care of the horses there when they had them.
pO: I was told that Ford was not really a veterinarian but he was pretty darn good, too, with animals.
MG: Yes, he was.
Now, back to my conversation with Cheryl:
CM: I had 2 or 3 horses in the pasture, and one of them was pregnant with a filly, and she gave birth while I was a junior in high school. And because I didn’t have the foresight to realize I’m going to need to be next to this horse for awile, Ford took over that part…and he, being the old crusty farmer, thinking livestock is livestock, fell in love with horses and he had quite a long history of just loving horses from that time on. The horses eventually all went away because I wasn’t there any more.
pO: By the way, I read an obituary from when your mom died. And they had this long segment about her recipe for cooking venison. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/stltoday/name/gertrude-schwaiger-obituary?id=2882410
CM: Yes, we put that in there because…it was kind of Viennese…she was born near Vienna…and part of her spirit was having this very… If you’ve never tried that recipe… You try it, and you’ll see why we decided to put the whole thing in.
CM: Let me say…we had really, really great Christmases out there. Dad planted a lot of trees. Those trees were mostly Scotch pines, but also a lot of noble firs, and those are still there. The Scotch pines all have a life span, and they blew over in a straight line wind. Many of them were lost… He really liked planting trees. There’s an old cherry tree we brought from our house in St. Louis, and put in there…it’s still there.
pO: You dug it up?
CM: We dug it up. My name is Cheryl, so the cherry tree was for me.
CM: Dotty Struckhoff played a part in it.
pO: Dotty? She was our neighbor there in Augusta. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/emissourian/name/dorothy-struckhoff-obituary?id=47564962
CM: When mother first went into Augusta she said, ‘you know, I think there was a young lady who came from Augusta, and was a housekeeper with me during the war’. …because Roland was overseas serving, and Dotty had to make some money…and she took a job…with my mother…and we looked her up. So, Dotty and mother knew each other already. That was the beginning of a whole other…almost, like for mom, a coming home, because she’s walking into this little German community.
pO: So, you were a teenager there…
CM: Right, so I go off to college.
pO: And your brother (Frank, Jr.) is younger than you?
CM: No, he’s 7 years older. I’m 77 now, he’s 84.
They (her parents) came out less, and less often…I think that had something to do with aging, and who knows? I was devolving into my own process, and I didn’t emerge from that until 1982. So, I had college and a career and work, and went back to doing things…partly with my family overseas because we don’t have a lot of relatives in this country. So, I was in Vienna studying, and meeting, and living with or around my cousins in Germany. I ended up working in New York City for awhile…but back to California, which is really where my heart lives.
I started thinking about coming back to Missouri in 1982 and by ’87 I told mom that for inheritance, I would like to inherit the farm. My brother was not very interested in the country at that time…and I felt that he ought to have 10 acres, and we cut out 10 acres for him. Later on when Maryville was deeded the property…that would be 2008 or so…I cut out a little more for him. So, he had 20 acres to have a real piece of land around him…where his dwelling was…a comfort zone.
When I moved back to Missouri in the 90s, I bought Hendricks’ acreage, and I still own that. So, I’m a little land owner in Missouri.
Gentle readers, I think I’m finished with this installment of my Schwaigerhof story, but when I get back to you, I’ll tell you what I know about the sculpture in the alfalfa field.
I will also give you an abbreviated history of F.R.E.S.H. Renewal Center.
Entrance to F.R.E.S.H., now property of Maryville University.
But wait! There’s more! I stumbled upon an online article regarding Frank Schwaiger’s career at Anheuser-Busch. I found it very interesting, and I plan to share it with you.
Stay curious and do good work.
paulO
The Friends of Historic Augusta's S.A.G.E project (Stories of Augusta's German Evolution) is sponsoring this program (TILIW stories) in partnership with the Missouri Humanities and with support from the Missouri Humanities Trust Fund. If you wish to read more stories, or want to make a donation to Friends of Historic Augusta and Tell It Like It Was, please use this link: https://www.augustamomuseum.com/tell-it-like-it-was-stories
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