Webster Groves,

September 1940

Dear Children:

Just received a letter from Mathilda. dated Tuesday, in which she asks whether I am not with CM [Crunden Martin] any more. No, I am in the home building business now, under the name of Dixie Home Builders, Phil Keller and Associates. The associates are my sub-contractors.

Our next home will be at No. 145 Central, on a lot 100 x 230, and it will have a lot of the idea in it which were mentioned in one of the "News" letters last spring. We will have a summer cottage room over the garage, room size 20x11, connected with the house by a screened porch, 12x12, the porch ibeing 12' in back of the house. A Post-Dispatch clipping of the picture and arrangement is enclosed. Mathilda say on account of Merl's stand on conscription we may have seeral refugees soon. If you will remember in that Spring article I felt that in a large family, for many reasons, some of them might need shelter and while I have not carried out the ideas to the extent mentioned in the article, our new home will have say 90% of them, but the acreage, of course, is missing. The cost of the house will be about $6500, the 100' lot, $1000, total $7500. Central Ave. is three blocks south of Big Bend at Rock Hill. Just east of us a retired Lutheran minister has a 300' lot with a great big old frame house on it.

I have applied for my final [naturalization] papers which I can get as a man married to a woman who is a citizen. If I pass, I will not have to register (by December) [as an 'alien']. Of course, I have decided to do all the things that are required to become a citizen. When years back, I tried to find an answer to the question of war service, I could not find anyone who could help me come to a decision. From an independent standpoint I could see then that if mad dogs would attack humans, humans would have to destroy the dogs, and if humans would descend to the state of mad dogs, we could logically conclude that human dogs would have to be destroyed. From the Christian standpoint I believe that our government and our constitution recognizes honest conscientious objectors as living up to their belief. Whether the Christian teachers were the answer to the world's woes was one of my questions, and that question is debatable as ever.

Whether at 526 Sheffield, or at 145 Central, we have lots of room for all who will come, and at 145 the "overhead" is down so that we should be able to have a home to go to at all times as far as we can see now.

Three years ago, I called him "Hitlower" and I am hoping that he will have enough decency and sense not to go too far and I have the idea that in that case the war will not last much longer, and the destruction of property would not be so great on both sides that one or the other will give up.

In times of stress one needs to use all of his senses.

(signed) Father