This is a picture of my grandfather, Paul Henry Alexander Schultetus, who was born in 1882. He grew up in St. Louis near the brewery where he would walk to get his grandmother a bucket of beer. His family and the Busch family had been neighbors back in Germany. After he moved to Illinois, Mrs. Busch would often pull up in her long black limousine to bring him messages from Germany.
My grandfather was six feet tall or over and quite handsome. He never wanted surgery because he refused anesthesia. Had all his teeth pulled without it. He never went to college but was a ravenous reader of everything; books, encyclopedia, magazines, and newspapers. He was a stickler for proper grammar.
Not many today have heard of vaudeville, but this man was in vaudeville. Actors, dancers, singers, and all sorts of entertainers traveled across the states and Canada in the early 20th century to many theaters to do their thing. My grandfather was an actor who often used the stage name Barney Smith. Bert Lahr, Rose Marie, Dorothy Lamour, and Walter Brennan were all in vaudeville, along with many other names you would recognize. Many entertainers left as vaudeville waned to start acting in silent movies. Paul then did a bit of acting on Broadway with his sister, Elsa, but he didn’t like the gig of being a statue and left!
He worked as an artist with his other sister, Emmy, in New York, also, got tired of that, then went back to Illinois, to a farm he had already purchased, and got married. Well. He was sick, and his doctor told him to take it easy. Hah!
After their first house burned near Coulterville during the Great Depression, he bought a much larger farm in Pope County and they moved away. And with some of the insurance money, he and Velma went to town and bought a Victrola and records. What a surprise for the kids.
He had his irons in many fires while marrying and raising twelve children. He was a published author who wrote a variety of short fictional stories for magazines until his seventies; he raised registered collies; sold chickens by mail as well as the collies; continued to paint and enter art shows after they moved to Florida in 1950 because he was too old for the cold; and he was a very interesting farmer using all the techniques he could learn by reading.
He took his children out at night to lay on blankets as he taught them the constellations; took them and Velma, my grandmother, to the movies; and took them all to town and made ho-made ice cream in a sorghum bucket on the way home in the wagon while the children took turns turning the bucket in ice in a tub.
He held them up with his arms and walked them on the ceiling, and then his petite wife had a turn. He made kites out of newspapers and cars out of cinnamon cans. They dyed dozens of eggs from their hens for Easter for their own kids and the neighbors and had fireworks on the 4th. During the war when they couldn’t get fireworks, he made his own. They also hosted the neighbors who would come over to listen to the radio. He delivered all twelve of the children that Velma conceived. What a man.
He lived until eighty-five and would have lived longer, but he fell in the living room and broke his hip.
He was tall and handsome. I think he looks like a fine gentleman with his parted hair, bow-tie, and hat. It might have been a staged photograph, probably around 1905 during is vaudeville years.