Ramsey County History – Fall 2011: “Growing Up in St. Paul: The West End Neighborhood of the Thirties and Forties”

Growing Up in St. Paul: The West End Neighborhood of the Thirties and Forties
Author: Douglas R. Heidenreich

Somewhere, probably in a shoebox filled with curved, faded, brittle pictures shot about seventy years ago on a Kodak Brownie camera, Douglas Heidenreich has a short letter from Gerhard Bundlie, a lawyer who was the Mayor of St. Paul in the early nineteen thirties. The letter, on official mayor’s-office stationary, congratulates the author’s parents on the birth of a son (Douglas), who had been born on February 29, 1932. This is a charming account of what life and growing up were like in St. Paul’s West End in the 1930s. Heidenreich carries his account forward to 1945 when soldiers, including his older brother began to return home from service in World War II.
PDF of Heidenreich article