Ramsey County History – Summer 2011: “Growing Up in St. Paul: The Rondo Years, 1948–1950”

Growing Up in St. Paul: The Rondo Years, 1948–1950

Author: Susanne Sebesta Heimbuch

The author describes her years growing up in the Ramsey Hill district in the late 1940s. The neighborhood was a mix of whites and Blacks, as she recalls it, but was known as Cornmeal Rondo and was considered by many as the poorer part of St. Paul’s African-American community. Her mother’s Irish relatives—Clancies, Conways, Lawlers, and McIntyres—attended the nearby parishes of St. Luke’s, St. Mark’s, and the Cathedral. This is an intimate portrait of Heimbuch’s family that captures both the highs and lows of growing up in a family under stress. The account ends with the family moving in the summer of 1950 to a home in rural Anoka County, an area that was fun for the children to explore and experience but a place of physical isolation for their mother, who longed to be close to her relatives and friends in St. Paul.
PDF of Growing Up in Saint Paul