Calvin Nathaniel Souther

"My grandfather Souther (Papa Cal) started as a telegrapher and worked up to asst General Passenger Agent of the RR. He would have been president if he had had more formal education of which he had none. He was the youngest of three sons who moved on to the farm in Milwaukee. His father died before be was born.

Both he and Mama Cal went through the Chicago fire and lost their first home or were forced to move to the south side on account of it."

Calvin Souther Fuller - September 9, 1972

Where the Southers lived in Chicago:

"Anyway this section of Chicago was called Auburn Park and it was a middle-class residential section. Most of the men commuted on the Rock Island Railroad to white-collar jobs in the "loop", about 10 miles away. My grandfather, who I called "Papa Cal", was then or soon afterward general passenger agent for the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, quite a good position. He had worked himself up from telegraph operator, a job he acquired soon after he started to work for the "Road" when he was 18. He was born in 1856 and when I was young, he was almost fifty.

The Souther home was a fairly large one for those days. It had a spacious porch extending across the front and around the south side. A smaller porch off the dining room and near the back was seldom used. The house had a big front hall with an alcove containing racks for apparel, and a wall telephone with its hand crank for calling the operator. As one entered, there was a natural oak staircase which rose to the right from the middle of the hall. Under it was a large closet for all of the children's things, including bats, balls, tennis rackets, and the like. In the middle of the hall in the floor was a large square opening covered by a grille-work out of which all the heat to warm the house came. Most of this went straight up, and in the winter you generally had to keep warm by sitting in front of the fireplace in the living room where a fire of cannel coal burned constantly. Somehow this family of nine, sometimes plus two maids managed to live in the nine rooms and one bath. But at that time sleeping two in a bed was the normal thing.

The two older boys, Will and Gal, were gone from home when as was my mother, Bess.. Frank was soon to Leave for Montana where Papa Cal had homesteaded a 640 acre farm near Mildred. There Frank was to contract typhoid fever and come home to die at the young age of 28. Sid was home weekends. He was studying at Armour Tech to be an electrical engineer. Harold was in high school and Norm, who was only four years older than I, was in the Ogelsby grade school across Halsted street where the trolleys ran. It was Norm who I tagged after and as I will mention later, from whom I learned a great deal about mechanics, electrical things and much more.

It is said that when I was four or five, Norm resented me when I came to visit and planned little "accidents" that I would be blamed for. Once he was accused (perhaps wrongly) of giving me an ink bottle with a loosely screwed-on top which I promptly emptied on the living-room rug. I cannot attest to this but i do known I worshiped Norm and would do whatever he said.

Never to be forgotten were the dazzling fireworks displays at the Southers every fourth of July. People came from all over the neighborhood to see them. in those days public fireworks were a rarity. The fireworks themselves always ar¬rived in a box the size of a trunk and were stamped with all sorts of Chinese writing. You see Papa Cal helped the Chinese immigrants get rail passage in the U. S. and this was their way of expressing appreciation.

There were pinwheels. Roman candles, colored lights and even some burning figures. But I liked the firecrackers the best. These were hung in strings of whole packages from clothes poles nailed to the roof of the front porch and when they were lit, they sounded like a battery of gattling guns. why the house didn't catch fire I will never know, I wonder now whether the great impression made on me by these displays helped to play a part in my choosing chemistry as a career.

I remember the hammock strung between the two big poplar trees in the back yard where Papa Gal snatched a little sleep.

On Sundays, the big watermelon parties we used to have in the "backyard with all ,the grown-ups, the inclined doors on the basement entry way which we kids used as a slide, the high bull-rushes across the alley where we used to have Vietnam-like battles, and the garden full of tomatoes and sweetcorn. I also recall the time the maid, in her excitement, tossed a pillow out the window for me to land on after the screen holding me had given way. But it is difficult to order these impressions in time because I was coming to visit on Emerald avenue over many years."

From Calvin Souther Fuller autobiography

"My grandfather Souther (Papa Cal) started as a telegrapher and worked up to asst General Passenger Agent of the RR. He would have been president if he had had more formal education of which he had none. He was the youngest of three sons who moved on to the farm in Milwaukee. His father died before be was born.

Both he and Mama Cal went through the Chicago fire and lost their first home or were forced to move to the south side on account of it."

Calvin Souther Fuller - September 9, 1972