MY MOTHER DID MOST OF THE JOB
by Daniel B. Suits

It would take more than the available space to do her real justice but maybe this sketch will convey some idea.
She had much more formal education than my father. She was in her first year at Washington University (St. Louis) when her father died and she had to go to work. She found a job with the St. Louis public library, and there she met my father. They married and I was born a year and a half later. Beginning to talk, I called my mother "Monnie," and that became her permanent family name.

Monnie was an organizer and doer. When we moved to the little St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, she volunteered her library experience to help found a public library. She followed this by organizing, and for many years leading, a women’s book club devoted to reading and discussing a wide variety of topics. Once, with afriend, she published a little literary magazine, but it lasted only three or four issues.

She was prominent in art and literary circles. In 1924, she organized a group of women to open a public library in Kirkwood, which became the first tax supported public library in St. Louis County in 1926. Hollis E. Suits was president of the Kirkwood School Board from 1930 to 1942.

She managed this while bringing up six sons. (My parents always said the reason they had six sons was that they had no daughters.) At any rate, Monnie’s firm ideas about child rearing differed widely from those of her friends. For one thing, she believed in minimum supervision. She left us pretty much free to do

Monnie (center) and Friends 1914

what we wanted, depending on our common sense to keep us in bounds.One room in our house, designated the "playroom," was set aside as a place where kids could freely indulge their energetic activities. Occasionally our more violent games gouged a hole in the plaster wall. Monnie’s reaction was to cover the hole with a section of blackboard made from a piece of plasterboard and black slate paint. By the time we kids were grown, a blackboard, complete with chalk rail, extended clear around the room.

Whenever one of us showed an interest in anything, Monnie found resources to further the interest. When, curious about Native American pictographs, I had exhausted the slim resources of the Kirkwood library, she took me to the central St. Louis library and dug out material on the topic. When we kids wanted to build a clubhouse to be nailed onto to the back of our home, she sent us to the hardware store for nails and to the lumberyard for wood. From a magazine ad, we bought molds to make lead soldiers, and Monnie gave us free access to the kitchen stove to melt ladlefuls of lead for the molds.

My youngest brother began to paint, but felt confined by the small size of available paper and canvas, so Monnie encouraged him to paint a large mural on the kitchen wall. She later drove him across the state so he could show his work and get advice from the Missouri painter, Thomas Hart Benton.

Monnie and Her Lemon Tree

As you can imagine, Monnie’s permissive approach to child rearing earned her a certain reputation, a reputation that was further embellished by such things as the episode of the piano. She had bought a new piano and rather than sell the old one, she moved it into the playroom for us to take apart. We entered into the task with enthusiasm, and as it happened, a neighbor kid had come over to play for the first time that day. At home that evening, his mother, as mothers will, asked him how he had spent the afternoon. That was the last time he came to our house.