FAVORITE THINGS: ERNIE’S BIRTHPLACE MUSEUM
Many readers have driven or walked by the Queen Anne Victorian at 339 N. Oak Park Ave. without realizing it was the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. There is a sign identifying the property, but going inside for a tour is where Hemingway’s early years came alive for me.
Hemingway, a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner has been called one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Born here in Oak Park in 1899, he was delivered by his father, a physician who had an office downstairs, in a second-floor bedroom of the home.
I recently took a tour of the home, the first with electricity in Oak Park. It is now the Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Museum, restored authentically to the layout in which Hemingway spent his first six years. The combination of Victorian décor, arranged in the way it looked when Ernest lived there, family photographs, and the knowledge and enthusiasm of our docent, Erik, transported me back to Hemingway’s childhood. I felt like the Hemingway family might appear at any moment.
Hemingway left Oak Park after high school, and didn’t speak or write much about his “dry” hometown. But the tour showed me how his early family life and Oak Park influenced this great writer.
I stood in the Victorian parlor next to a piano similar to the one on which his mother Grace, an opera singer and musician, gave music lessons to local students. She earned more money than her doctor husband, was an active suffragette, campaigning for women’s right to vote, and was a member of the Nineteenth Century Club.
I saw the bedroom where Ernest’s heavy-drinking, traveling-salesman Uncle Tyley lived with the family when he wasn’t on the road. His uncle helped Ernest get his first job as a reporter in Kansas City. His training as a reporter, using limited words, influenced his writing style. I also wondered about his uncle’s influence on Hemingway’s alcoholism.
Photos of relatives who were Civil War veterans and heroes to Hemingway made me wonder if they influenced his decision to serve in WWI and fight in the Spanish Civil War. Our docent showed photos and told us stories of the Hemingway family’s visits to their summer cottage in Michigan where Ernest’s father taught him to hunt and fish, observe nature, and live in the outdoors, activities he pursued throughout his life and found its way into his writings.
While standing in the kitchen, looking around at the coal-burning stove and porcelain sink standing on spindle legs with a washboard under it, I was intrigued hearing about the Hemingway family’s storytelling skills. The Hemingway adults told stories while they sat around the kitchen table. At the age of 4, Ernest told his family a story about a pack of loose horses nearby on Lake Street that were going to trample a family and how he grabbed the reins and saved the family.
According to Carla Mayer of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, most of the visitors come from the U.S. She said, “There are also visitors from China, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Many of these foreign visitors have shared that Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was the first book they read in English in their ESL classes. The book is short, with declarative sentences. These visitors come to Oak Park to learn more about Hemingway, who had an impact on them.” Carla also told me that when Oak Parkers come, it is mostly with their out-of-town company.
I would encourage locals to take a tour, step back into Victorian times and be surrounded by the early life of Ernest Hemingway.
For more information about tours and the Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Museum go to https://www.hemingwaybirthplace.com/
Joy Aaronson is an Oak Park resident who writes stories for Wednesday Journal about her favorite things in the village. Previously, she contributed to Chicago Parent and wrote the Kids’ World column for the former Logan Square Free Press.
